The gaming industry continues to grow rapidly, and it is projected to grow another 30% in the next three years1 . Online gaming is driving this growth as the industry is making a seismic shift from disk to digital. This shift comes with an abundance of opportunities and challenges, as digital gaming makes it easier than ever to get games into the hands of more players, in more places, in less time. TechValidate Research surveyed 131 Akamai Technologies, Inc. customer accounts to find out more about how gaming companies are innovating the marketplace and the challenges they need to overcome in order to do so. The results show the importance of web security, that acquiring and retaining new users is the biggest business challenge companies are facing, and that mobile is taking over as the most popular gaming platform.

While the shift from disk to digital offers tremendous potential opportunities, it also presents a host of new challenges for gaming companies. As the online channel grows increasingly complex and the pace of innovation accelerates, many companies struggle to keep up. Not only are there websites and storefronts to manage, but also real-time gaming servers, large software downloads, and live-streamed competitions and events. Games are transforming from fixed, boxed products to dynamic, ongoing services – with frequently updated content, in-game micro-transactions, virtual goods and social interactions. Mobile adds another dimension to the trend, as consumers increasingly look to play on smart phones and tablets – or on multiple screens across devices. To successfully navigate this complex and changing landscape, gaming companies need an agile, high- performance infrastructure that allows them to turn the Internet into a reliable and effective online distribution channel. This requires f

The tipping point has arrived. Large enterprises are planning their next-generation datacenters around flash-based storage, and for good reason. Flash arrays provide read and write performance that is orders of magnitude faster than spinning media at a total cost of ownership that is on par with disk and will soon be lower. The benefits not only include improved application performance, but more consistent performance, lower latency, reduced storage footprint, streamlined storage administration, and lower operating costs. These advantages are too beneficial to your business to ignore. That’s why flash is becoming the standard for new storage investments.

For the typical enterprise, the volume of data that needs to be managed and protected is growing at roughly 40% per year. Add to that the performance requirements of new applications and the demands for instant response time, always-on availability, and anytime-anywhere access. With such demands, data center managers face storage challenges that cannot be addressed using traditional, spinning-disk technology.

In-memory technology—in which entire datasets are pre-loaded into a computer’s random access memory, alleviating the need for shuttling data between memory and disk storage every time a query is initiated—has actually been around for a number of years. However, with the onset of big data, as well as an insatiable thirst for analytics, the industry is taking a second look at this promising approach to speeding up data processing.

Learn about the HP 3PAR StoreServ storage architecture; this ChalkTalk from HPStorageGuy Calvin Zito looks at the Mesh Active Cluster that uniquely differentiates HP 3PAR from traditional disk arrays.

The world of storage is being transformed by the maturing of flash arrays, an approach to storage that uses multiple, solid state flash memory drives instead of spinning hard disk drives. An all-flash array performs the same functions as traditional spinning disks but in a fraction of the time required and in more compact form factors. Given its superior performance in certain contexts, all-flash arrays are experiencing strong industry adoption. However, best practices and a true understanding of key success factors for all- flash storage are still emerging. This paper is intended to educate you on best practices based on real user experience drawn from ITCentralStation.com. We offer all-flash user advice in selecting and building the business case for a flash array storage solution.

The increasing demands of application and database workloads, growing numbers of virtual machines, and more powerful processors are driving demand for ever-faster storage systems. Increasingly, IT organizations are turning to solid-state storage to meet these demands, with hybrid and all-flash arrays taking the place of traditional disk storage for high performance workloads. Download this white paper to learn how you can get the most from your storage environment.

The Gartner Magic Quadrant for General-Purpose Disk Arrays is intended to help IT leaders better understand general-purpose disk array vendors' relative positioning in the market. In their 2017 report, Gartner places Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) in the Leaders quadrant. HPE 3PAR StoreServ, HPE Nimble Storage and HPE XP7 represent HPE’s offerings in the general-purpose disk array market.

Imagine the benefits that a VDI environment could realize during a boot storm. All the VMs are based on the same template, and therefore they all have the same set of files during initial boot. Normally, 100 VMs all booting at the same time would require a significant number of HDDs, but with this hyperconverged infrastructure platform, the first VM to boot reads the block off the HDD, which promotes that block into cache. Now the next 99 VMs can all access that same block from cache. That’s a 100:1 IOPS reduction on the IOPS-bound disks.

Enterprises today increasingly turn to array-based snapshots and replication to augment or replace legacy data protection solutions that have been overwhelmed by data growth. The challenge is that native array snapshot tools – and alternative 3rd party solutions – have varying degrees of functionality, automation, scripting requirements, hardware support and application awareness. These approaches can add risk as well as administrative complexity and make it more difficult to realize the full potential of snapshots – whether in single disk vendor estates or in heterogeneous storage environments. This checklist will enable you to build a shortlist of the 'must have' features needed for snapshots to deliver exactly what you require in your application environment or Private Cloud.

Databases have long served as the lifeline of the business. Therefore, it is no surprise that performance has always been top of mind. Whether it be a traditional row-formatted database to handle millions of transactions a day or a columnar database for advanced analytics to help uncover deep insights about the business, the goal is to service all requests as quickly as possible. This is especially true as organizations look to gain an edge on their competition by analyzing data from their transactional (OLTP) database to make more informed business decisions. The traditional model (see Figure 1) for doing this leverages two separate sets of resources, with an ETL being required to transfer the data from the OLTP database to a data warehouse for analysis. Two obvious problems exist with this implementation. First, I/O bottlenecks can quickly arise because the databases reside on disk and second, analysis is constantly being done on stale data. In-memory databases have helped address p

This start-up guide provides instructions on how to configure the Dell™ PowerEdge™ VRTX chassis with Microsoft® Windows Server® 2012 in a supported failover cluster environment. These instructions cover configuration and installation information for chassis-shared storage and networking, failover clustering, Hyper-V, Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV), and specialized requirements for Windows Server 2012 to function correctly with the VRTX chassis.

During the course of research efforts in the all-flash array (AFA) space, IDC is still encountering IT executives, particularly CIOs and CFOs, who have an outdated perspective on relevant cost metrics for comparing all-flash solutions with legacy hard disk drive (HDD)–based systems. In IDC's view, flash is an absolute requirement for performance reasons in any 3rd Platform computing environment. While most understand the need for flash performance, there is still a subset that does not view the broader use of flash in the enterprise as cost effective

How do solid-state drives really match up to hard disk drives? This Infographic illustrates a side-by-side comparison that quantifies how the differences extend beyond cost per GB. See how SSD and HDDs stack up against each other with facts on reliability, capacity, latency, transfer rates, IOPS, and power consumption.

Old Dutch Foods, known for its broad selection of snack foods in the midwest United States and Canada, was struggling to get the right products to the right places at the right time. Its data center included outdated physical servers, and batch processing meant that inventory would not be updated until the end of the day as opposed to real time. In addition, recovering from power outages and disk failures could frequently take up to two weeks. To modernize its data center, Old Dutch Foods invested in EMC Converged Infrastructure. The fast and easy deployment of two VCE VBlock® systems running JD Edwards, MS Exchange, mobile device apps, and operation of a backup site with replicated applications and data. This enhanced the IT department's responsiveness to the business, allowed them to shift to real-time inventory, and reduced CapEx and OpEx costs. Operations were simplified by reducing person-hours needed for infrastructure maintenance by 75 percent.

Våra två säkerhetsexperter Chung-wai Lee och Håkan Nohre diskuterar aktuella hot som Ransomware och mer avancerade attacker, och vad man bör tänka på för att skydda sig. Vi berättar om en kund från fastighetsbranschen som blev attackerad och hur de hanterade IT-incidenten.

Is there that much of a future for magnetic spinning disk? Even if manufacturers could move to 30,000 rpm disks with better areal density, the constraints in the engineering and physical capabilities of magnetic disks will still put them orders of magnitude behind flash-based systems in overall performance terms.

After you set up your users and groups, the next thing you’ll want to do is configure the software running on your machines. In this webinar, you’ll get a taste of the many kinds of services and packages Puppet can manage on Windows. We’ll present some common use cases that will help you get some quick wins under your belt, including: - Managing Windows services (Windows Time, Disk Defragmenter, etc.) - Installing packages - Managing Windows maintenance tasks via WMI by executing arbitrary PowerShell code - Creating scheduled tasks in the Task Manager Puppet can do a lot, but we always recommend starting small and building on your success. Make 2016 the year you banish manual configuration for good!

This ESG Lab report presents the results of a mixed workload performance benchmark test designed to assess the real world performance capabilities of an IBM Storwize V7000 storage system and IBM x3850 X5 servers in a VMware-enabled virtual server environment.

Stellen Sie sich eine Personalleiterin vor, die eine hoch effiziente HR-Abteilung führt: Als CHRO – oder vielleicht trägt sie auch den heute schon gängigen Titel „Chief Employee Experience Officer“ – nimmt sie in nicht allzu ferner Zukunft an einer Telefonkonferenz zu den Finanzergebnissen teil. Sie unterstützt den CEO darin, zu veranschaulichen, wie neu formierte Mitarbeiterprogramme zu dem jüngsten, positiv überraschenden Unternehmensgewinn beigetragen haben. Im Anschluss stellt die Personalchefin eine Verbindung zu einem modernen Virtuality-Reality-Konferenzraum in einem Tokioter Hotel her, um ein Pressebriefing zu geben. Sie bittet die Teilnehmer (mithilfe ihres „Hearable“- Übersetzers, der sie in Echtzeit dolmetscht und der nun von jedermann diskret im Ohr getragen wird) auf Japanisch, ihre kurze Verspätung zu entschuldigen, bevor sie ihre innovativen Pläne zur Schließung von Kompetenzlücken durch kontinuierliche Schulungen am Arbeitsplatz vorstellt, die auf die gesamte Asien- Paz

Are solid-state arrays (SSAs) worth the extra cost? This independent survey of SSA users found that their deployments provided a positive ROI after only 5.4 months, significantly faster than hard-disk drive (HDD) storage systems. Discover why Gartner strongly advises that SSAs be considered whenever HDD-based storage systems need to be replaced. Read the report: Solid-State Array TCO Reality Check.

Are you building a business case for replacing disk systems with all-flash? Read this paper to find out what enterprise users are saying about their own experiences with all-flash storage. Findings are based on over a dozen different product reviews.

In competitive business environments, speed is a key differentiator. IT organizations worldwide have realized significant value in transitioning from traditional disk to flash-based storage architectures, paving the path to making businesses more responsive and ultimately more competitive. Learn how to transform traditional IT with high-speed data delivery while reducing the costs and risks.

The technical and financial advantages of solid state drives are driving a rapid transition from hard disk-drive (HDD) and hybrid-flash array (HFA) storage systems to all-flash arrays (AFAs). The white paper identifies some of the key considerations for evaluating all-flash storage infrastructure for three major uses cases: standalone applications, virtualized applications, and next-generation cloud services.