Nicos Vekiarides

All the buzz surrounding OpenStack over the past few months may beg the question of whether Openstack can repeat for Cloud what Linux has done for server operating systems over the past several years. With an enthusiastic following and a compelling, if not industry-leading set of... (more)

It’s only natural that most organizations split their IT budget between new technology to enhance business operations and maintenance of their existing infrastructure. Although the actual split varies across organizations, it is striking how high the typical percentage of budget ... (more)

With hypervisors a ubiquitous component of nearly every IT deployment, virtual appliances present a compelling alternative to traditional physical appliances by offering a simpler and faster software deployment model. In recent years, many data storage vendors have jumped on the ... (more)

A recent GigaOm article proclaimed “There’s no need to be a one-cloud company.” The article proceeded to highlight reasons why organizations ought to consider distributing their cloud-based applications and risk across multiple cloud providers. While such a tactic may seem unnece... (more)

It’s no secret that many organizations have begun to look at public and private clouds as alternatives to traditional IT infrastructure. In January 2012, Enterprise Strategy Group published their 2012 IT Spending Intentions Survey revealing that 28% of organizations surveyed were... (more)

The notion of standardizing access to object-based cloud storage across vendors and cloud providers is not new but promises to have a positive impact on cloud storage users and overall adoption. In his recent article, A Call for More Cloud Storage Standards Support, Mike Vizard c... (more)

There are many excellent reasons to use cloud storage, but fast and efficient transfer of large amounts of data isn’t usually listed as a benefit. That’s one of the reasons why people use cloud storage gateways: to speed up cloud storage access. Recently, I realized we’ve never p... (more)

While many would say it’s not a matter of “if” but “when,” this week has sparked some storage industry experts to ponder whether the high-margin data storage market is beginning to feel the impact of cloud adoption. To elaborate, let me direct your attention to two of this week’s... (more)

While the notion of Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) may seem a bit far-fetched, Shadow IT, where users essentially bring unauthorized cloud services into business environments, has become an increasing corporate concern as highlighted in a recent CFO.com article. The risk of Shadow I... (more)

What are some good reasons to adopt cloud storage? Cost, durability and flexibility. So let me talk about performance, instead. Look at this graph: As part of our daily testing, we do routine performance measurements across a broad swath of cloud storage providers. It gives us ... (more)

Every year, our friends at ESG post results of their annual Spending Intentions Survey, indicating where many businesses are likely to spend their IT dollars over the coming year. Recently Steve Duplessie posted an article on his blog entitled Cloud – The Cost Containment Strateg... (more)

You may have seen Amazon’s announcement of the AWS Storage Gateway beta here, here, and here. Truth be told, the cloud storage gateway market is starting to catch fire. Amazon’s move validates the need for an iSCSI cloud storage gateway to easily deliver cloud storage into busin... (more)

This week, a CloudArray user sent us this email, and he gave me permission to share it. CloudArray has been installed in lots of countries, but I think this is the first airborne installation! We love getting product feedback (good and bad) to help us improve the CloudArray user ... (more)

With 2012 already upon us, the time has come to make resolutions for the New Year. In the world of IT, this means resolving to abandon bad habits, unreliable processes and cumbersome tasks that often get in the way of business priorities. With the emergence of cloud storage as a ... (more)

It’s time to make a few predictions for 2012 in the cloud data space. 2011 was a year of adoption, during which many companies started to leverage the cloud, enjoying the economies of scale, security and ease in managing their growing data needs. Those successes promise even grea... (more)

If you ask IT administrators about their goals for storage infrastructure at remote and/or branch office (ROBO) locations, you’ll likely hear that they want to improve application performance and, at the same time, minimize the footprint of remote office storage infrastructure.  ... (more)

The following article was contributed by Margot Rudell from the HP Scaling the Cloud Blog. From time to time, we’ll post articles about how specific partners and customers use HP Cloud Services.  Today, I’d like to introduce TwinStrata’s CEO and co-founder Nicos Vekiarides and ... (more)

For many businesses that haven’t yet formulated their cloud adoption plans, the notion of looking beyond the cloud may sound a bit peculiar. After all, isn’t cloud the final frontier that promises to transform traditional IT infrastructure into a control panel offering limitless ... (more)

As business adoption of cloud computing and cloud storage takes hold, new benefits of cloud IT versus traditional IT continue to emerge on a regular basis. One recent example is the Carbon Disclosure Project Study 2011: Cloud Computing – The IT Solution for the 21st Century produ... (more)

Storage area networks (SANs) have become the ubiquitous deployment model for block data storage systems, interconnecting formerly siloed storage arrays with a common high-speed network running standardized protocols such as Fibre Channel or iSCSI. It was over a decade ago that th... (more)