October 15th, 2019 by Guest Author

What is EDSFF Form Factor?

Existing enterprise SSDs form factors are not a good fit in modern data centers. Servers and storage appliances, generally use several types of SSD for booting, performance, or capacity, and that usually requires using more than one SSD form factor (M.2, U.2, or PCIe card). Aiming to overcome the limitations of existing interfaces in the data center, a new storage form factor was created, the Enterprise & Data Center SSD Form Factor (EDSFF).

The EDSFF states the following challenges in today's data center.

October 14th, 2019 by Blaise Robitaille

What Is RAID1

RAID1 Mirrors the data across multiple disks (Minimum of 2). By spreading the data across more than one disk should you suffer a fault (Drive failure) your drive controller would simply send you an alert that a drive has failed and that you should replace the failed drive at your earliest convenience. There are speed benefits compared to a single drive however you loose the capacity of the mirrored drive. 

October 14th, 2019 by Adam Armstrong

Commvault Launches Metallic SaaS Brand

Today at Commvault’s annual Commvault Go show in Denver, Colorado, the company announced a new brand, Metallic. Metallic will be Commvault’s new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) portfolio aimed directly at the midmarket and the most popular applications and workloads for that market including Core Backup & Recovery, Office 365 Backup & Recovery, and Endpoint Backup & Recovery. Metallic is said to deliver Commvault’s core protection technology, through an affordable, cloud-based model.

October 11th, 2019 by StorageReview Enterprise Lab

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Review

StarWind offers a line of Microsoft Windows based HyperConverged Appliances (HCA) designed to meet the needs of SMBs and other use cases that are generally budget constrained. Their portfolio includes 20 unique solutions which fall into three broad model lines the HCA All-Flash, HCA Hybrid, and HCA Disk. The All-Flash is designed for small and mid-size SMB virtualized environments and this configuration provides the best performance. The Hybrid models are built to deliver high storage capacity and great performance without having to go all-flash. Additionally, the Hybrid models utilize automated storage tiering to handle performance-intensive workloads in a cost-efficient manner. This platform offers a balance between performance and cost. The Disk models are built to provide high storage capacity and moderate compute power for capacity-hungry applications. This is a high capacity option with the best cost per GB value. 

October 9th, 2019 by Michael Rink

Samsung Develops 24GB High Bandwidth Memory

Samsung announced that is has developed the industry's first high bandwidth memory chip manufactured using 12-layer 3D-TSV (Through Silicon Via) technology. High bandwidth memory (HBM) is used in lots of computer components used in artificial intelligence and machine learning applications like high-end graphics cards, FPGAs, CPUs, and networking devices. Previously, the best anyone could do was 8-layer. Samsung was founded in 1938 and is well known for its electronics products. They've been one of the major drivers in this area for some time. Impressively, this is the second advancement they've made in the HBM area this year; last March, they announced the development of a very high capacity HBM2E chip named Flashbolt with 410GBps data bandwidth and 16GB of memory.

October 8th, 2019 by StorageReview Enterprise Lab

NetApp AFA EF600 Review

Last month NetApp announced its latest midrange all-flash array with the EF600. While the EF600 is aimed at the same market as the EF570, it is not a replacement. While the EF570 does support NVMe, the EF600 is end-to-end NVMe, which brings new levels of flexibility and performance not previously seen in the midrange. Aside from the performance and price to performance ratio, the EF600 offers a level of future proofing that will be able to hit the demands of tomorrow without the need for forklift upgrades. 

October 8th, 2019 by Tom Fenton

ClearCube C3Pi+ VDI Client Review

The ClearCube C3Pi+ is a low-cost, and very small form-factor, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) client based on the Raspberry Pi B+ platform. ClearCube is positioning this product for use by state and local governments, medical organizations, kiosks, and other environments where a low-cost, single monitor VDI client is desirable.

October 8th, 2019 by Adam Armstrong

Datera & HPE Release Software-Defined Cloud Kit

Toady Datera, Inc. announced that it is expanding its partnership with HPE (that centers around go-to-market solutions) with the release of HPE Datera Cloud Kit. HPE Datera Cloud Kit are several Datera pre-packaged configurations for enterprises looking to bring the Datera software-defined platform to their hybrid and private cloud environments. This new kit is a package that can be bought “off-the-shelf” and contains all flash, software-defined, scale-out storage that delivers performance and availability along with simplicity for cloud, Tier 1 workloads.