Edge IT spending is on the rise If you have focused your IT solutions and services only on meeting data center requirements, you could be missing out on tremendous opportunities in edge, remote and branch office (ROBO) IT. Despite all the excitement around applications as a service and moving services to “a cloud,” many […]

Continued from Deep Dive: Cloud Service Availability Part 1 What is the impact of cloud on availability? With cloud adoption rising, many organizations see it as a longer-term solution to providing a home for their infrastructure and data, primarily to reduce the cost of in-house IT, but also to improve service. So what effect does this […]

  Avoiding downtime and ensuring maximum service availability or uptime is a critical requirement for many organizations that operate around the clock. Fundamentally, this requirement applies to IT infrastructure that supports the business, no matter where it is located – from centralized data centers to remote sites and more recently the “cloud”. In this article […]

By Luke Pruen, Technical Services Director at StorMagic StorMagic has a major focus on edge computing with SvSAN. The product has truly been developed with the challenges of remote management and functional requirements in mind. A key component of this is reducing the amount of hardware required at an edge location where SvSAN can start […]

IT budgets have never been tighter for many organizations. However, it’s important to have the ability to meet the needs of infrastructure scaling while keeping critical data safe and accessible. IT budgets have never been tighter for many organizations. However, it’s important to have the ability to meet the needs of infrastructure scaling while keeping critical […]

Continual data growth, storage and IT administration budgets and minimal downtime are concerns that echo back to us from a large proportion of storage managers that manage edge, remote office and branch office (ROBO) storage. Presented with a conventional set-up with storage arrays, drives, memory and CPUs engineered together, storage managers can find themselves with […]

VSAs provide shared storage cost effectively Virtual Storage Appliances (VSAs) are a very cost-effective solution – not only from a point of sale aspect, but also from the perspective of daily operations. It’s easy to see where a VSA saves you money on initial purchase, especially when compared to a physical SAN, but a VSA […]

Downtime at the edge: a serious problem  Billions of dollars in revenue are lost each year as a result of downtime. It is then understandable that revenue loss is the primary concern of retailers when considering the direct impact of store downtime. However, retail organizations have more to lose from downtime than revenue alone; customer […]

  Internationally recognized excellence  Founded in the 1930s as a ferrite producer, TDK has since gone on to become an internationally recognized electronics components manufacturer. Their products can be found in everything from modern smartphones, computers, electrical appliances, industrial equipment and automobiles. TDK’s European offices needed a highly available solution to ensure that their business-critical […]

Can hyperconvergence work at the edge? Edge computing, remote offices, branch offices, small data centers, and IoT use cases are on the rise – and research suggests that growth in these areas isn’t due to slow down any time soon. For use cases such as remote offices, the ideal solution is often a small data […]

Refresh your knowledge with our quick Remote Office Tech Tip What are the differences between fault tolerance, high availability and disaster recovery solutions? When is it best to employ these solutions – and in which environments will these solutions be effective? Find out the answer to these questions and more, in our handy Remote Office […]

Running business-critical applications at the edge can be challenging StorMagic understands the challenges of running business-critical applications at the edge – especially for large regional or national retail organizations with many locations and no IT resources at the store level. So how do you achieve affordable application uptime, shared storage, high availability and reliability while […]

“StorMagic’s SvSAN enables us to cost effectively implement simple, 2-server highly available systems with minimal hardware requirements.” E.ON Climate & Renewables (EC&R) division is responsible for the renewable activities of E.ON Group. They are active in generating energy from onshore and offshore wind, biomass, photovoltaic and concentrated solar power. EC&R IT was tasked with delivering […]

What do you need to deliver high availability applications? In short, you’ll need at least two virtualized servers and some way for applications to failover between computers. Find out more about how you can achieve high availability and minimize downtime in our quick and simple Remote Office Tech Tip – available now on YouTube! Click […]

It’s no surprise that today’s organizations demand high levels of application and data availability across the enterprise. But delivering this level of high availability is difficult, particularly because of the additional hardware and management required and the costs and complexities they introduce into the IT landscape. Most organizations have to find ways to deliver what […]

2018 has arrived, and StorMagic has lots of exciting new content to share over the coming months. This January, we’ll be focusing on a collection of related topics: Resiliency, High Availability and Stretch Clusters. As a reminder: “[availability] is a measure of the percentage uptime, considering the downtime due to faults and other causes such […]

New case study: Germany’s St. Josefshaus St. Josefshaus is a hospital and nursing home in Hausen, Germany that offers services to both young and older people. They provide housing, meals and on-site care for the physically and mentally ill. The servers and storage that support all of the facility’s applications (including Citrix Desktop, back office […]

The mindset towards onsite IT has changed drastically. Over the years there has been a gradual move away from the traditional hefty store IT infrastructure with more investment into implementing streamlined environments which are de-centralized in application control yet centralized in management. For retail IT, ensuring uptime of critical applications across their stores is their […]

Check out our latest white paper: Building a Highly Available SvSAN Configuration For businesses across almost all industries, downtime is disastrous. Aside from lost productivity, downtime often results in interrupted service provision, dissatisfied customers and ultimately, lost revenue. The solution is to ensure that IT systems are designed with resiliency in mind – high availability […]

  The University of Oxford is an internationally renowned institution that is consistently ranked among the best higher education establishments globally. Oxford’s Faculty of Classics is part of the university’s Humanities Division and is the largest faculty of its kind in the world. As well as educating, it produces world-leading research through its three research […]

Cloud-mania has gripped the minds of many IT professionals in recent years, promising advantages over traditional computing such as simplified disaster recovery, rapid scalability and lower capital expenditure costs. However, many CIO’s will tell you that moving all applications to the Cloud is unrealistic – and potentially dangerous when it comes to organizations that handle […]

Retail is one of a handful of verticals whose revenue, brand, culture and customer experience is directly driven by their distributed sites and stores. Enterprise retail organizations with thousands of sites face the enormous challenge of maintaining each store’s performance on these key impact points by ensuring that their staff are well trained, stores are […]

Click here to access the webinar recording Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is becoming all the rage, but without a clear idea of requirements it is easy to over-provision – resulting in unnecessary expenditure and over-the-odds maintenance costs. Equally, an under-provisioned solution can lead to premature upgrades in the future and even unwanted downtime. If you’re ready […]

While the data storage demands of organizations have increased, many companies’ IT budgets have shrunk. Organizations are seeking to re-evaluate costly and complex traditional storage models, in favour of adopting software-defined storage and hyperconverged solutions. The sometimes ambiguous use of these terms to describe a variety of different virtualization based solutions means challenges of performance, […]

Virtualization is driving itself toward replacing onsite hardware and running from the “cloud”. This is something that I believe is very achievable in the not so distant future, but there is one comment or concern I hear often: “But it wouldn’t be able to compete against physical hardware” Physical Storage performance is dependent on the […]

Throughout November we focused on HCI deployment – diving into topics such as the pros and cons of ‘build your own’ HCI solutions, and comparing BYO HCI solutions with pre-configured appliances. If you missed out and would like to learn more about this topic, you can browse our full article archive by clicking here. This […]

Make Every Day a Black Friday with SvSAN Black Friday is upon us and while many companies are helping you save money for one day only, here at StorMagic we have a clear message: Make every day a Black Friday for your storage by choosing StorMagic SvSAN! Underpinned by simplicity, cost-effectiveness and flexibility, StorMagic SvSAN […]

This article continues on from our previous post: Have you developed ‘must have all-flash’ or ‘shiny new HCI toy’ syndrome? John Glendenning examines (and busts) 10 myths relating to all-flash and HCI solutions. Carrying on from my previous article addressing many IT professionals’ fixation with all-flash and HCI, I’d like to engage in a spot […]

Deploying and optimizing storage across remote sites can be an expensive and time-consuming undertaking for businesses of any size. Click here to access our full Remote Office Tech Tips series! While it may be tempting to cut corners, this can result in costly downtime, overall performance loss and premature upgrades in the future. For businesses […]

John Glendenning examines the rise of all-flash/HCI mania, and explains why a correctly-provisioned and cost-effective approach is a better fit for many businesses. Have you developed ‘must have all-flash’ or ‘shiny new HCI toy’ syndrome? If you have – don’t panic. You’re not alone as many share your affliction and it’s probably not too late […]

Based on the picturesque Caribbean island of Sint Maarten, The Maho Group has been an established name in the region’s leisure, real estate, gaming and resort industries for over 35 years. The group’s property portfolio includes a number of locations across a range of Caribbean hot spots, as well as resorts at Maho Beach and […]

Our SvSAN data sheet is now available in Spanish! StorMagic makes edge computing simple. Our virtual SAN product, SvSAN, is designed specifically for small and large enterprises with one to thousands of locations that require highly available compute and storage at the lowest possible cost. If you’re looking for more information about SvSAN, our SvSAN […]

Our SvSAN white paper has been updated! Implementing effective edge computing solutions can be challenging. Elevated hardware costs and additional maintenance/deployment challenges mean that expanding your operation can quickly become a headache-inducing experience. StorMagic SvSAN makes virtual SANs simple for edge computing: eliminating the need for expensive and high-maintenance physical SANs and simplifying your edge […]

Are you looking for hyperconverged infrastructure? Maybe. I suspect that few of you are actually sending out a request for proposal (RFP) for hyperconverged infrastructure. That’s not how, in my experience, most of you who are IT professionals think about solutions. What you do think about is the fact that you have a budget that […]

Where scalability and ease of deployment are key requirements of storage infrastructure for most distributed organizations, hyper-converged infrastructure models are enjoying a lot of attention from technology evaluators. Research from the likes of ESG and TechTarget’s Storage Market Landscape Study concur that adoption of these integrated computing platforms (ICP) is already high and that a […]

Why are organizations choosing hyperconverged infrastructure? For SMEs and distributed enterprises, a hyperconverged infrastructure is an attractive proposition in combining compute, storage, networking and virtualization into something that can be scaled out easily and meet the demands of applications across a variety of sectors. A key component within any appropriate hyper-converged proposition is ‘virtualization’, removing the need […]

Hyperconverged Infrastructures (HCI) are a hot topic, it seems that every server vendor in the IT industry is talking about them and have an offering or play in the space. But, what exactly are hyperconverged infrastructures? Simply put, hyper-converged infrastructures are solutions that combine compute, storage, networking and virtualization into a single platform. As with […]

New white paper – available to download now! In line with our November theme (hyperconverged infrastructure deployment), we’re proud to announce the release of our latest white paper: “Build Your Own vs. Appliance – A Comparison of HCI Deployment”. This white paper is ideal for those who are interested in deploying hyperconverged infrastructure and want […]

November is upon us, and so is the latest StorMagic monthly theme: Hyperconverged Infrastructure Deployment! Over the coming weeks, we’ll be posting new content on www.stormagic.com relating to hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and how it can help your business by supercharging your storage – regardless of the size of your business or number of branches. HCI […]

IT shops are always on the lookout for ways to improve application performance without negatively impacting availability and adding cost or complexity. Of course, adding more servers to the environment could do the trick – but comes at a steep cost and in many cases, added complexity (more servers means more things to manage and […]

High security that required high availability Cisco’s Secure Ops is a managed cybersecurity solution for Operational Technology networks. Before implementing SvSAN, their original architecture ran in their datacenter and was dependent on non-HA local storage – intended to minimize downtime and provide a good level of performance for their clients. When they revised the architecture […]

Aging SANs put your business at risk Is your SAN getting old? Is the maintenance becoming increasingly expensive and time-consuming? Has it failed recently? Are you running out of much-needed capacity? If the answer to any of the above questions is ‘yes’, then perhaps you’re already looking into replacing your old SAN with a newer […]

Mission: improve system performance ITsjefen AS is a hosting and managed services provider based in Tronheim, Norway. As part of their mission to offer impeccable highly available service to their customers, Solutions Architect Anders Kringstad realised that they needed to improve system performance. After reviewing the hyperconverged market – and deeming usual suspects unsuitable – […]

Storage can quickly become complicated as businesses branch out Large organizations know more than most about how difficult it can be to ensure continuity of business operations. Maintaining business up time across multiple branch offices is a big challenge, even for the most experienced of IT administration teams. ‘Inevitability’ is an IT administrator’s sworn enemy. […]

High-flying storage in Portugal’s top airports ANA Aeroportos manages 10 of Portugal’s biggest and busiest airports including the capital’s largest, Humberto Delgado Airport. As the airport authority for some of Europe’s most important transportation hubs, ANA needed a reliable and flexible solution that fit within their budget constraints. That’s where SvSAN came to the rescue […]

Missed our last webinar? Full recording and presentation slides now available on-demand! Last week, we hosted the latest in our StorMagic webinar series: “A New Alternative to All-Flash Arrays: Predictive Storage Caching”. We hope all of our attendees had a great time – it was fantastic to host so many interested people, and receive so […]

New white paper – available to download now! In the spirit of our October theme, we’re proud to announce the release of a brand new Predictive Storage Caching-related white paper: “Closing the Performance Gap – SvSAN Caching”. This white paper is the perfect introduction for those wanting to learn about the practical applications of Predictive […]

“If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It” My old man used to drill this statement into me like a copper screw, living firmly by the timeless adage of “if you mess with it, you’re going to break it”. For the most part he was right – everything I played with as a kid often ended […]

IoT is on the rise . . . The Internet of Things (IoT) is a hot topic right now, experiencing dramatic growth driven by the increasing number of devices being used, from sensors, actuators and valves in a chemical factory to home automation control systems (Nest, Apple HomeKit, Phillips Hue) to wearable fitness trackers (Fitbit, […]

IP EXPO Europe: “Europe’s #1 Enterprise IT Event” For 2 days last week, ExCeL London was transformed into a veritable tech oasis. Showcasing everything from cutting-edge new software (which naturally included SvSAN) to TV’s very own Brian Cox, IP EXPO Europe provided something for everyone – and no one left the event feeling disappointed. The […]

Looking for an alternative to expensive all-flash arrays? Throughout October, StorMagic will be exploring all-things related to Predictive Storage Caching. As well as posting new blogs and whitepapers, we’re hosting the next installment of our StorMagic webinar series: “A New Alternative to All-Flash Arrays: Predictive Storage Caching”. Join StorMagic storage expert and systems engineer Luke […]

October is just around the corner . . . To mark StorMagic SvSAN being selected as one of the ‘Top 25 IoT Solution Providers of 2017’, we celebrated by promoting IoT themed content throughout September. If you missed out on any of our September IoT articles – ranging from its application in manufacturing to new […]

Organizations all over the world are becoming more reliant on technology in order to operate as the demand for IT resources continues to grow exponentially. And yet, many IT managers are trying to meet the challenge of reducing carbon footprints without sacrificing performance or productivity. In this blog, we share several tips on how businesses […]