Stefan Bernbo

Cloud computing has given birth to a broad range of online services. To maintain a competitive edge, service providers are taking a closer look at their Big Data storage infrastructure in an earnest attempt to improve performance and reduce costs. Large enterprises hosting their own cloud servers are seeking ways to scale and improve performance while maintaining or lowering expenditures. If the status quo of scaling users and storage infrastructure is upheld, it will become increasingly difficult to maintain low cost cloud services, such as online account management or data storage. Service providers will face higher energy consumption in their data centers overall, and many are loath to begin charging for online account access. Costs vs. Benefits In response to the trend of growing online account activity, many service providers are transitioning their data cente... (more)

Future Proofing the Data Center

More and more of our lives are lived online. Our music collections, bookshelves, vacation memories and more are increasingly digitized and uploaded into the cloud, the vast network of server farms that provide the bulk of online storage today. Research firm Gartner projects that by 2016, 36 percent of consumer content will be stored on the cloud, up from a mere seven percent in 2011. Service providers, watching these trends with a wary eye, will be required to accommodate ever-increasing demands for storage as consumer appetites for cloud content storage continues to grow. To ad... (more)

Consolidating Big Data

Cloud computing has opened the doors to a vast array of online services. With the emergence of new cloud technologies, both public and private companies are seeing increases in performance gains, elasticity and convenience. However, maintaining a competitive advantage has become increasingly difficult. Service providers are taking a closer look at their data storage infrastructure for ways to improve performance and cut costs. If the status quo remains, maintaining low-cost cloud services will become increasingly difficult. Service providers will incur higher costs, while consum... (more)

Virtualization and the Next Generation of Storage Architecture

Legendary Intel co-founder Gordon Moore's eponymous law holds that the number of transistors per square inch of chip will double every two years, a prediction that has held remarkably firm as incredibly tiny devices have been made increasingly powerful. In recent years, that assertion could be used to apply to the creation of data as well. An IDC study in 2011 showed that the amount of data created by every device and person in the world would double every two years, with a staggering 1.8 zettabytes (1 billion terabytes) created in 2011 alone. A significant driver for this trend... (more)

The Future Is Now: Why Flash Storage Will Transform the Data Center

For an example of just how dramatically storage has changed over the past fifteen years, consider your music collection. At one point, you had a collection of cassettes that stored the song files on tape. As the years went on, your hairstyle changed and you bought a CD player that used a spinning disk to store more song data at a higher quality than tape could. Spinning disks flourished well into the MP3 player era, surviving even the initial introduction of flash storage due to its competitive cost. Eventually, however, your newest smartphone or iPod shipped with flash storage i... (more)