The allure of client virtualization is increasing in the eyes of enterprise organizations. Aside from its obvious benefits of eliminating the management headaches and upgrade cycles of corporate desktops and laptops, organizations can better meet the growing demands of employees who want to bring their own devices (BYOD) to access corporate networks. However client virtualization can result in enterprises simply swapping one set of problems for another unless organizations first assess what their requirements are so they may put a solution in place with the right framework for their environment. (read more)

New found agility, reduced CAPEX and OPEX and centralized IT infrastructure management are driving the adoption of private clouds. But as organizations enter them their dark side of management complexities becomes more plainly seen. This is where HP's heightened integration with Microsoft Systems Center 2012 with its Virtual Machine Manager component comes into play. (read more)

Using a common console to manage servers and storage coupled with a roadmap to automated disaster recovery (DR) are becoming almost prerequisites in VMware vSphere deployments. Key to delivering on these emerging requirements is employing a midrange array that (1) integrates with and is managed by vCenter Server, and (2) facilitates the implementation of VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM). (read more)

Using array-based snapshots for virtual machine (VM) protection and optimizing storage efficiency are two sought after features in VMware deployments. However, this does not mean that all midrange arrays deliver on these capabilities equally. If anything, the differences in how midrange arrays support them may be quite substantial. (read more)

One of the more revealing findings out of the recent DCIG 2012 Midrange Array Buyer's Guide was the gap between those midrange arrays that integrate with the VMware vSphere storage APIs and those that do not, as it was almost a case of the "Have's" and the "Have-not's." But among the "Have's" there are still levels of differentiation in vSphere integration that the Buyer's Guide did not examine in depth. (read more)

It is rare to find is a storage configuration that improves the efficiency and manageability of large Exchange deployments even as it improves speed and performance. So it is notable that HP's recently released Exchange Solution Review Program (ESRP) results for Microsoft Exchange 2010 meet both existing and new enterprise requirements while tripling Exchange's database performance over that of competitive storage systems. (read more)

"Dedupe everywhere" is becoming a guiding principle in how enterprises now strategically look to deploy data deduplication into their organizations. But it is now recognized that these organizations need a common mechanism to deduplicate data throughout their environment to optimally manage and scale it. It is in this context that HP recently announced its new StoreOnce B6200 Backup System along with a number of StoreOnce feature enhancements as HP takes its deduplication story further into the enterprise. (read more)

The introduction of the HP P10000 into the HP 3PAR line of storage systems about three (3) months ago firmly put 3PAR systems in the realm of high end, Tier 1 storage. But the new V400 and V800 models in the HP P10000 line do more than increase the available storage capacity and performance of existing 3PAR storage systems. They indicate that the mainframe-like requirements that enterprise data centers have for storage systems persist and that, in order for HP to keep up, it needed to introduce a high end storage system that possessed "Big Iron" like attributes to meet these growing storage cloud requirements. (read more)

No one ever gets every decision right the first time. In fact, most of us are lucky to get most of our decisions mostly right most of the time. Yet to date storage administrators have been forced to live in somewhat of an alternate universe where the expectation is that they plan and execute on storage allocations perfectly every time. (read more)

In 2010 the amount of digital information created in the world exceeded a zettabyte for the first time. Now, in 2011, enterprises have to deal with the reality of managing and storing that amount of data. As they do so, they are coming to the realization that the majority of that data may only be actively accessed for a short period of time. (read more)