Media Coverage

When it comes to storage, IT professionals’ biggest challenge is figuring out how to serve an increasingly distributed enterprise. The problem is, as New York Times columnist Tom Friedman has memorably written, “The world has gone flat.” This trend is forcing IT to deploy infrastructure to a hodgepodge of remote locations with a broad set of requirements. Some locations may be as large as headquarters; some may be a half a dozen people with flaky network access.

Until last year, when XO Group employees wanted to share information or access it remotely, they usually bypassed IT and simply opened up a personal Dropbox account. While this step allowed them to access files anywhere and collaborate with colleagues, it also decreased corporate security, centralization, and IT control.

Each year we ask IT pros what they love, and this year several cloud-related products ranked among the favorites.

Spending on cloud services is so far just a fraction of total IT spending -- roughly 3% -- but the market is growing. According to research firm Gartner, global spending on public cloud computing services will grow 18.5% in 2013 to $131 billion, up from $111 billion last year.

Virtualization used to be about servers and desktops, but the technology is working its way into other parts of IT infrastructure. As virtualization adoption has flourished, so too has the services business of IT solution providers. All of the hype about virtualization beyond the server is starting to come to fruition.

Amazon is down again! We’ve all heard the phrase recently. Replace Amazon with Microsoft Azure or Rackspace or Google and it still seems like “the cloud is down” every few months. Outages from public cloud providers do happen, but not every outage is created equal and not every outage impacts customers in the same way.

Call them cloud controllers, cloud storage enablement or maybe cloud-integrated storage. Just don't call them cloud storage gateways, at least not when you're talking to any of the vendors who sell these intelligent cloud storage systems.

Nasuni serves distributed enterprises by combining on-premise hardware, cloud storage and an integrated service. Nasuni's Filer storage controller allows businesses to remotely control and manage easily accessible data volumes and provide shared data to multiple global locations.

One of the key uses of server virtualization technology is to enable public cloud computing, and one of the key uses of public clouds is to provide cloud storage. But deciding who offers the best public cloud storage system is a tricky task, as we shall shortly see.

As reported by Brandon Butler over at Network World, in test conducted by Nasuni, a storage technology provider, Microsoft Azure’s cloud outperformed Amazon Web Services in a series of rigorous tests.

Microsoft Azure's cloud outperformed Amazon Web Services in a series of rigorous tests conducted by Nasuni, a storage vendor that annually benchmarks CSPs (cloud service providers).