Dell boosts Foglight's virtual storage management support

Dell Inc. updated its Foglight virtualization management platform this week, adding support for more SAN arrays and improved monitoring tools to Foglight for Storage Management.

Along with Foglight for Storage Management, Dell's Foglight platform includes Foglight for Virtualization Enterprise Edition and Foglight for Virtualization Standard Edition. Dell acquired the Foglight platform when it purchased Quest Software for $2.4 billion in June 2012. Dell changed the entire platform's name to Foglight in February.

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Dell Foglight management tools upgraded, rebranded

Several Dell Foglight applications -- picked up in last year's Quest Software acquisition -- were upgraded and rebranded this week. The upgrades include Foglight for Storage Management and Foglight for Virtualization Enterprise Edition.

The Dell Foglight products were part of the vendor's $2.4 billion acquisition of Quest in July 2012. Quest picked up the virtualization management technology when it acquired vKernel in November 2011. The storage management technology was acquired by Quest when it scooped up the assets and staff of Monosphere Inc. in January 2009.

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Storage hypervisor solves city's VM management and performance problem

Moving its physical servers into a VMware vSphere virtualized environment three years ago caused a problem for the city of San Luis Obispo, Calif., IT team. City Network Services Supervisor Miguel Guardado found he constantly needed more spindles for his Dell Compellent storage array to keep up with IOPS requirements.

He eventually solved the problem by letting Virsto Software Corp. VM management software do much of the work, but not until after he made several hardware additions.

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Lab speeds up test app with Kaminario K2 all-flash array

When Nick Mahmood discovered in May that his legacy storage area network (SAN) couldn't supply the necessary IOPS and lower latency required to support his network consolidation project, he turned to a 10 TB Kaminario Inc. K2 all-flash storage array.

Mahmood is the vice president of IT for environmental testing laboratory TestAmerica Laboratories Inc., which analyzes environmental samples and provides analytical reports using its TALS laboratory information management system.

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Protecting petabytes: Best practices for big data backup

One of the issues created by holding voluminous data sets (also called "big data") in your storage environment is how to protect that data.

Petabyte-size data stores can play havoc with backup windows, and traditional backup is not designed to handle millions of small files. The good news is that not all big data information needs to be backed up in the traditional way.

Nick Kirsch, director of product management for EMC’s Isilon scale-out NAS platform, said it helps to be more intelligent about the data you have when doing big data backups. He advises that, before you consider how to protect your data, you should take a good look at what data needs to be protected. Machine-generated data – report data from a database, for instance – can be reproduced easier than it can be backed up and recovered.

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Scale-out network-attached storage: Options in today’s market

In storage, scale-out systems are becoming a popular option to deal with rapid data growth. File data is growing the fastest, making network-attached storage (NAS) the most popular type of scale-out storage. Clustered NAS systems that fit the “scale-out” tag are targeted at processing heavy applications such as “big data” analytics and large file environments.

Storage vendors differ over the best way to architect a scale-out network-attached storage system, but the largest vendors and many smaller ones have pushed into the market. Most scale-out NAS systems use individual device nodes, which can be commodity servers or proprietary devices. As interest in scale-out systems has increased, well-known storage vendors such as Dell Corp., EMC Corp., Hewlett Packard (HP) Co., Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) and NetApp Inc. have acquired technology to offer their own scale-out NAS products. IBM OEMs NetApp’s technology while it develops its own.

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Integrated IT stack: Packaging the pieces of the virtualization puzzle

Some of the biggest names in the storage industry now offer integrated IT stacks for organizations looking to quickly deploy high-performance virtualized environments. EMC Corp., NetApp Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Dell Inc. sell predesigned architectures that include the virtual server platform, networking and computing gear, and storage infrastructure in one package.

While it’s early for the integrated storage stacks, vendors and their distribution partners expect the trend toward data center consolidation around virtualization and cloud storage to spark interest in integrated stacks.

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