In December 2020, the HCI landscape witnessed another shift with big player Microsoft stepping into the arena with their latest hyperconverged storage solution, Microsoft Azure Stack HCI. This entry garnered lots of attention, with the company promising a powerful solution that integrated tightly with their existing cloud service product, Microsoft Azure. However, it has also marked the beginning of the [...]
In early 2024, we sat down with StorMagic’s Chief Revenue Officer, Brian Grainger, and PBG Networks’ Director of Professional Services, Paul Wozniak to discuss Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware and the upheaval that it may cause for VMware users and partners alike. Long-time StorMagic partners, Paul talks about PBG Networks’ experiences with StorMagic, and most importantly, what they advise VMware partners [...]
Since Broadcom acquired VMware, IT executives, system administrators and storage engineers have been looking around, wondering whether they need to start thinking about alternatives. For many of them, their organizations will be heavily reliant on VMware products for virtualization and high availability. While some may be able to absorb licensing changes and price hikes, others are less confident, and consequently [...]
In March 2024, StorMagic released its latest update to Edge Control, the cloud-based monitoring and management tool for StorMagic SvSAN. The release marks a step-change improvement for large enterprises and Managed Service Providers (MSPs). Offering enhanced capabilities, this new update introduced the multi-orchestrator, a new feature that caters directly to the core needs of these users, streamlining infrastructure management, and [...]
Did you know that most disasters are localized to a specific room, building, or campus? Similarly, the majority of maintenance and repairs are completed in a single location too. These more frequent events often create significant disruption for IT operations. Luckily, this disruption can be reduced or eliminated through the use of stretch clusters. Join us for an in-depth navigation [...]
In the world of banks and finance, IT challenges are all too common, particularly when it comes to legacy hardware. With high running costs, snail-paced transfer speeds, disruptive downtime, and looming cyber threats, it’s no surprise that many are turning to more modernized solutions like virtualized systems. If you’re interested in exploring the industry’s shift in this direction, we’ve got [...]
VMware by Broadcom has announced new subscription bundles, the removal of product options, and the cancellation of the VMware partner program. What happens now to VMware partners and customers? VMware Did It All Go Wrong? It’s not us, it’s you. VMware, why have you left us? You have always been there for us, the small and medium businesses, the remote [...]
Been keeping up with the news lately? If so, you'll already be aware that the VMware acquisition by Broadcom was officially completed late last year. As we all predicted, this has created significant disruption, resulting in significant layoffs, changes to the structure and cost of licenses for their 500,000+ existing customers, and the closure of VMware’s partner program. Many [...]
The news that Broadcom acquired VMware has been widely reported and dissected by experts, media outlets and other companies alike. At StorMagic we recognize VMware’s position within the virtual SAN market and believe that our offering, SvSAN is an ideal alternative or replacement for organizations concerned by the uncertainty surrounding VMware and vSAN. As the infographic shows, adding an ‘S’ [...]
Today’s organizations are generating more data at the edge than ever before, having to come up with new, creative ways to process and manage it in a cost-effective, efficient manner. Government agencies are no exception to this trend. However, when it comes to data storage, they do have unique requirements in terms of compliance and regulations, accessibility, and IT support. [...]
In the ever-evolving landscape of Information Technology (IT), the role of virtualization has become indispensable, and at the heart of this transformative technology lie hypervisors. Also known as virtual machine monitors, hypervisors play a pivotal role in enabling the creation and management of multiple virtual environments on a single physical server. As organizations increasingly seek to optimize resource utilization, enhance [...]
Cisco’s announcement of HyperFlex’s end-of-life has come as a surprise to many of its customers. Feelings of concern and uncertainty about what the future holds are understandable, even with Cisco proposing alternatives for their soon-to-be-retired solution. In this blog we will explore Cisco HyperFlex’s EOL, detailing what it means for customers, what is being proposed as its direct replacement, and [...]
While the data storage demands of organizations have increased, due to a number of factors, many companies’ IT budgets have shrunk. This has driven organizations to seek out and re-evaluate costly, complex traditional storage models, in favor of lightweight software-defined and hyperconverged storage models. The capabilities of virtualization-based products can vary from solution to solution. The challenges that organizations face [...]
Encryption is the process of protecting data by changing it from a readable form to an unreadable form. It uses complex algorithms to “scramble” and therefore protect data - as it’s unreadable and can’t be accessed.
What is the right number of nodes for software-defined storage server clusters? Is a single node enough to create a reliable and robust solution or is it better to have more? In this blog we’ll examine the use cases for one, two, and three-node software-defined storage solutions, their benefits, and their drawbacks. The Loneliest Number – Why is a single-node [...]
After much anticipation, we’re thrilled to announce the release of our latest product, StorMagic Edge Control. Able to simplify the administration of all SvSAN clusters, StorMagic Edge Control is an advanced hyperconverged storage monitoring and management tool that allows users to view the status of their clusters and easily make changes from anywhere. In this blog, we’ll be taking you [...]
Is your boss a little out of date when it comes to current virtual storage technology trends? Do they hate spending money on data storage, yet expect a flawless solution with zero unplanned downtime?... And worse still, do they think a monolithic physical SAN is the best storage option to help your organization achieve its data storage goals? If so, [...]
As the demands for enterprise storage continue to expand and the digital landscape shifts, so too does the need for innovative solutions that streamline operations, enhance data management, and improve overall efficiency. The technology of choice that’s emerged as a game changer in the digital storage space is the virtual storage appliance (sometimes referred to as VSA) which has dominated [...]
Over the years, mindsets towards onsite IT have changed drastically — particularly when it comes to retail store infrastructure. With a focus on virtualizing their environments and creating more efficient retail data storage, many retailers are moving away from traditional storage infrastructure in favor of solutions that offer de-centralized application control, with centralized management systems. With this in mind, it’s [...]
For modern retailers, managing a growing brand is no simple task. While their main goals may be to produce quality products, provide excellent customer service, and work towards growing profits, several other key factors are coming into play as technology advances. Maintaining an online presence through things like social media, virtual shopping, and digital advertising is now just as defining [...]
For small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), the rapid shift of today’s digital landscape has never been more challenging. But as technology continues to push forward rapidly, so must the businesses using it. Today, companies need to consistently keep up with change or risk no longer being able to provide the services needed to remain relevant in this hyper-competitive world – [...]
Virtualized storage, or storage virtualization, is a technological concept developed within the past few decades. It enables organizations to remove the traditional boundaries of physical storage devices, by abstracting the disks and drives, and presenting them as a single, centralized pool of storage capacity.
What is Edge Computing? Edge computing is a term used to describe decentralized IT infrastructure. In an edge computing environment, applications, computation, and data storage are all carried out near the source of the data (i.e. at the “network edge”), as opposed to in the cloud or at an offsite datacenter. By processing data locally and minimizing the distance [...]
A virtual storage area network (SAN) is a software-based component that provides a virtualized ‘pool’ of storage to multiple virtual machines (VMs) and applications. In order to achieve this, data is passed (shared) between servers over a network using a protocol such as iSCSI or fibre channel.
As cities become smarter, vehicles become autonomous, and technology permeates every aspect of our lives, enterprise-generated data continues to migrate away from the traditional datacenter to distributed sites, also known as the network edge. According to Gartner research, roughly 10% of enterprise-generated data is created and processed at the edge, with this number predicted to jump to 75% by 20251 [...]
IT hardware vendors inevitably promote the message that hardware is a crucial element of any hyperconverged infrastructure solution for edge computing. They’d be right, to a degree – the solution is made up of advanced software running on hardware, and is therefore dependent on that hardware. However, that hardware doesn’t have to be bespoke, nor does it need to be [...]
There’s much debate about edge computing vs. cloud computing. Headlines such as “Is Edge Computing the Future of Cloud?” and “Edge vs Cloud: Replace or Coexist?” send confused readers off on endless Google searches, for answers to these trigger questions. In this blog we’ll be delving into the key differences between these two very common deployment models, which is best [...]
StorMagic SvSAN is trusted by many manufacturers in Germany to keep production lines running and factories operational. Our German manufacturing infographic below explains why five of them chose SvSAN. In addition to the five examples in the infographic below, read through more of our manufacturing case studies such as Ontex BVBA, Keiser Corp and CAE S.p.A. For more information on [...]
Organizations operating with legacy hardware in distributed sites and at the network edge face a growing number of issues relating to deployment, maintenance, and cost. StorMagic understands these challenges and has been tailoring edge computing solutions to meet these unique requirements for over a decade. Explicitly built with harsh, remote environments in mind, our virtual SAN solution, SvSAN, delivers users [...]
The amount of data being created and stored at the edge is expanding rapidly, bringing with it the many challenges associated with operating in these environments, and causing more and more to turn to hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) as a solution. Today, HCI is used in a myriad of locations including datacenters, the private cloud, hybrid cloud, distributed enterprises, and small [...]
Industrial IoT is a natural extension of historical process control systems that have dominated factory floors for decades. In recent years, the increase in sensors and devices to monitor machinery and outputs has meant manufacturers are now moving from monitoring individual things, to monitoring entire processes from one screen. The result is the invention of industrial IoT as a catch-all [...]
IT is critical to a law firm and downtime is not an option. As well as lost productivity and revenue, downtime can also lead to loss of data, which can be difficult to recover. Very private personal data needs to be accessible and available at all times, for cases that are often time-sensitive. IT applications and systems in the legal [...]
The Internet of Things (IoT) is the networking of physical devices, vehicles, buildings, and other items which have embedded software, sensors, and network connections that enable these items to collect and exchange data. With the explosion of connected devices, IoT is a hot topic and experiencing dramatic growth, driven by ever-increasing ways to leverage the data being generated. IoT platforms [...]
IoT is on the Rise… The Internet of Things (IoT) is a hot topic right now, experiencing dramatic growth, driven by the increased use of connected devices, or endpoints. These devices vary from sensors, actuators, and valves in factories, to home automation control systems (Nest, Apple HomeKit, Philips Hue), wearable fitness trackers (Fitbit, Garmin), smartphones, and even traffic and transport [...]
Our world is constantly growing and evolving. By 2050, the human population is predicted to jump up to a whopping 10.8 billion people, with 68% living in urban environments. Consequently, there is increasing pressure to invest in more sustainable ways of living, like developing smart cities, that harness the power of the cloud and edge computing. Artificial Intelligence (AI), the [...]
With the advent of mobile connectivity, bring-your-own-devices, working from home, and this unilateral shift from on-premises to the cloud, the very way we consume and work with our data on a day-to-day basis has changed and is continually shifting. We’re used to these buzzwords being thrown at us from all angles, none more so lately than edge computing. But what [...]
As manufacturers modernize their operations, it is crucial that they find new ways to address the unique and ever-present challenges of running at the edge. The rapid development of Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things (IoT), which requires high levels of reliability, performance, and cost efficiency, has led to edge computing in manufacturing growing in importance over the past [...]
Organizations pursuing edge computing deployments need to consider all the different factors that characterize their edge environments, and then look for a solution that addresses as many of the challenges that are presented as possible. A typical edge computing use case or environment is not a smaller version of a datacenter, based on exactly the same technologies. Nor is it [...]
The IDC Perspective report, Hyperconverged Infrastructure Use Will Continue to Grow in Edge Environments (doc #US46034120, December 2022), on hyperconverged infrastructure at the edge is out, delving into the marketplace and what businesses looking to deploy this technology at their own edge sites should be looking for in their chosen vendors’ offerings. Growing fast, hyperconverged infrastructure can help businesses tackle [...]
Edge computing is one of the biggest IT trends of recent times. Companies of all sizes are focusing and investing heavily in it, as more data than ever is recorded and stored at an increasing number of locations and endpoints. But what exactly does “edge” mean, and what some typical use cases? It feels like the definition keeps on changing, [...]
Today, IT professionals have many choices on how to solve server, storage, and networking requirements in the datacenter, and at the edge. Hyperconverged (HCI) appliances and software-defined storage (SDS) solutions have emerged as an excellent alternative to traditional three-tiered architecture. In this blog, we’ll be giving you a background on the software-defined storage market and technologies available from vendors. We’ll [...]
Software-defined storage (SDS) solutions have come a long way in recent times and branched into areas that were previously thought impossible. IT best practice has always been about eliminating single points of failure. Back in the late 20th century, companies ran their software, applications and services on bare-metal servers which only had enough CPU to run one application at a [...]
The need for RAID at the edge RAID (redundant array of independent disks) is just one critically important form of data protection and has been a key component in disk drive configurations since the 1980s. It enables users to easily distribute data from any application across multiple physical storage devices, so that if one device fails, the applications keep [...]
Protecting data at the edge with RAID is a common assignment for IT administrators at most organizations. But realistically, which type of RAID is best for edge environments? Take a look through our RAID comparison infographic below to learn about the options and the pros and cons of each. Then, if you want more, you can check out our RAID [...]
GigaOm’s Radar for Hyperconverged Infrastructure: Edge Deployments report is out. The 2023 paper goes in-depth about the challenges decision-makers are facing presently at the edge, which vendors (including StorMagic) occupy the HCI space, and how their solutions can help companies tackle its many challenges. GigaOm describes edge deployments as being “among the most dispersed HCI environments, with small clusters at [...]
At the beginning of October, Gartner published their latest Market Guide to help organizations searching for edge solutions to find those that best fit their needs. The report outlines the many facets of edge computing, describing what customers can expect from the edge market now, in the short term, and in the future as the market matures.The key points the [...]
StorMagic SvSAN has been tested and validated on HPE’s ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus, and together, the two provide a robust, all-in-one architecture for the edge. Our MicroServer infographic below contains the all of the key information about both products and how they combine to deliver highly available storage in an incredibly compact device that doesn’t require server racks and can [...]
The challenges posed by edge computing are highly prevalent across all industries and growing still today. Acutely aware of this, StorMagic’s team of experts has been working tirelessly for over a decade to bring SMEs affordable solutions that help to tackle these challenges without sacrificing enterprise-class features or application performance. Since joining forces with HPE back in March 2020, we [...]
Within the last decade, advancements in technology have transformed the way datacenters are designed. Organizations today are creating and managing more data than ever, and IT infrastructures have evolved to meet their growing needs. Hyperconverged and composable infrastructures are two popular configurations within the IT space, ideally suited for particular environments, but not others. In this blog, we’ll discuss the [...]
What an amazing four days at VMware Explore 2022! Our onsite team of Bruce Kornfeld, Nolan Souder, and Stuart Campbell had a ton of interesting conversations with attendees, and had the opportunity to catch up with many of our customers and partners too. We want to say a big thank you to VMware for running the show – we had [...]
Continual data growth, storage and IT administration budgets, as well as minimal downtime are concerns being shared by a large proportion of storage managers in charge of edge and remote office/branch office (ROBO) locations. Presented with a conventional set-up of storage arrays, network hardware, and compute nodes engineered together, storage managers can find themselves with concerns over budget, skill set, [...]
IT professionals: If you need to select a hyperconverged infrastructure solution for your organization’s edge sites, do you automatically choose something with high specifications, or take a moment to stop and analyze your actual compute, storage and processing requirements? Why? Because there’s a growing trend among IT professionals where many are deploying all flash HCI solutions that are 10 to [...]
The HPE StoreVirtual solution has reached its end of life and is being retired by HPE. With StorMagic part of the HPE Complete program, StorMagic SvSAN is perfectly positioned as a replacement for StoreVirtual, and available directly through HPE. Many organizations that have relied on StoreVirtual for years are turning to SvSAN to provide highly available shared storage and our [...]
StoreVirtual reaches End of Service Life on October 31, 2022. When HPE announced they would be retiring their solution back in 2019, it stirred up many questions from its users who relied heavily on the StoreVirtual product for the normal functioning of their organization, as well as the potential customers considering the solution. Naturally many wondered “Will there be another [...]
Over the past two decades, virtualization has become a standard building block for millions of applications. It triumphed because of its powerful abstraction over physical hardware, allowing for better use, management, automation, and security. However, with the introduction of Kubernetes and containers, it is common to question previous assumptions and ask whether it is better to use bare metal Linux [...]
StorMagic SvSAN and VMware vSAN are two similar virtual SAN products offering highly available shared storage and hyperconvergence for organizations. And with Broadcom’s intention to acquire VMware spelling uncertainty for the future of VMware’s product offerings, including vSAN, we thought we’d take a look at why some current StorMagic customers chose SvSAN over the VMware alternative with this infographic. From [...]
StorMagic is excited and honored to announce that we’ve been recognized in this year’s Gartner Peer Insights ‘Voice of the Customer’: Hyperconverged Infrastructure Software report.What is Gartner Peer Insights’ “Voice of the Customer”?The “Voice of the Customer” is a document that synthesizes Gartner Peer Insights’ reviews into insights for IT decision makers. This aggregated peer perspective, along with the individual [...]
Two’s company, but three’s a crowd at the edge Edge sites and small datacenters are typically budget and resource-constrained - but they still need highly available applications to run their operations effectively. In these instances, system size does matter. If each site uses 2-node instead of 3-node architecture (i.e. two servers instead of three), massive cost and management [...]
SvSAN 6.3 is available now and is fully compatible with VMware vSphere 7.0u3c, and Microsoft Hyper-V and Windows Server 2022. Our infographic below details the main updates within this latest release of SvSAN and the benefits it brings to organizations using either hypervisor. Furthermore, vCenter users can now enjoy an updated SvSAN plugin that conforms to the current vCenter design [...]
The quality of both our products and our users' experiences are integral components of the StorMagic brand. That's why we work tirelessly to try and ensure our software is of the highest caliber, and we deliver the best service to you, our customers. While getting to this goal is achievable, we do need a little help – that’s where the [...]