Want on-demand pricing, but need your infrastructure to stay on-site? HyperGrid now offers just such a solution.

In the seemingly endless onslaught of announcements from Apple’s WWDC, there didn’t seem to be any specific updates or news on the Touch Bar. Released about six-months ago as “a revolutionary new way to use your Mac”, I was expecting to get something out of the event. Perhaps a roll out of the Touch Bar to the desktop keyboards. Maybe some statistics about how many developers have adopted the new interface. But instead, we got nothing…

Caching and tiering have been abused by marketing in enterprise IT, often used interchangeably, or simply when not applicable. Luckily, we’ve got a table, it’s round, and surrounded by storage experts. They’ll explain the technical differences between caching and tiering, how to identify which is being used, and what are the performance implications of each.

Hyperconverged infrastructure has been around for a while. We’ve seen companies go public on the strength of the market, and companies get acquired for the same reason. It’s a way to simply the often complex world of provisioning and managing a virtualization infrastructure. But HCI has been around long enough that the limitations of that model have become clear to the enterprise. Any new entrant to the crowded market should have solutions to those problems.

Today, NetApp announced their entry into the HCI market. In their messaging, they hammered in on those limitations.

In this iteration of Gestalt Server News:
– Datrium makes its case for Open Convergence
– We find out what exactly is Big Data
– Disambiguating HCI and Hybrid Cloud
Plus, Cray is partnering to bring supercomputing as a service to the masses

A decade ago, flash began changing the storage market in profound ways. We’re now seeing similar disruptions with NVMe. But the speeds of the new interface bring to light new bottlenecks for performance, especially at scale. Intel designed their Storage Performance Development Kit to specifically focus on driving down latency to allow for scaling that borders on linear.

Backblaze just released their 10th annual survey results on backup frequency. As a personal and business backup provider, they have a clear interest in the responses. But, like their disk drive reliability numbers, it’s nice that they share the results publicly.

Once a term gets pegged as trendy in enterprise IT, its actual meaning quickly goes out the window. It becomes less about what that word represents, and more about how you can skew your existing products to somehow claim to be part of this rising trend. This quickly leads to a morass of marketing bluster, and genuine confusion about how solutions and products fit into categories.

Keith Townsend tries to rescue two of the trendiest buzzwords in use today: hyperconverged infrastructure and hybrid cloud.

Veeam as a company has largely eschewed agents for their VM backup solutions. But when it comes to physical servers, the company is offer not one, but two agents to help with your backup and recovery needs.

With the just announced onQ Ransomeware Edition, Quorum is now specifically designing a solution just for that use case. Instead of a ground up rebuild of their solution, Quorum is leveraging what was already working with their DR solution, and creating a skinny bundle to target the problem. Essentially, this is a box designed to deliver the high availability of onQ exclusively, as opposed to the other general DR features, like second site recovery support.