The Top Five of 2018

As we kick off 2019, we are taking a look back at our top five most popular blogs, whitepapers and webinars of 2018 to see what our audience enjoyed over the past year. There are several recurring themes that figured predominantly, including: business continuity/disaster recovery, freedom from vendor-lock-in, the need for zero-downtime, software-defined storage education and adoption, and storage management.

We got such a great response to these posts that we wanted to put all of the resources in one place for our readers. Enjoy!

The Top Blogs of 2018

1. Preparing for the Healthcare Data Tsunami with Hardware-Agnostic Solutions
   In healthcare today, there is an explosion of valuable data that hospitals are challenged with protecting. Hospital IT teams must safeguard information and plan for improved accessibility, scalability and performance while working within already tight budgets.
2. 17 Shocking Statistics about Disaster Recovery and Business Resiliency—Where Does Your Organization Stand?: Part 1
   Disasters come in many flavors, and although most people think of them in terms of events such as epic storms, a business can also face threats from security breaches and data center outages caused by less dramatic incidents. When you stop to consider the value of your data, it becomes clear that you cannot afford to be complacent when it comes to disaster recovery. This blog summarized 17 surprising statistics that show most companies are not prepared for a site outage.
3. If I Use NVMe, Why Do I Still Need Parallel I/O?
   NVMe creates parallel, low latency data paths to underlying media to provide substantially higher performance and lower latency. These promises lead some to believe that NVMe is essentially a “catch all.” However, NVMe is only one part of a bigger picture within which we continue to see the struggle between serial vs. parallel I/O. As a result, NVMe and Parallel I/O are not mutually exclusive; rather, they are complementary technologies.
4. What is Software-Defined Storage and Why Should You Care?
   The term software-defined storage (SDS) started gaining popularity in 2013, and software-defined everything was suddenly a hot topic in technology. But the roots of SDS lie elsewhere, in a concept known as storage virtualization.
5. How to Extend the Life of Your Storage Hardware and Free Your Business from Vendor Lock-In
   Hardware refresh cycles represent one of the most challenging moments in IT’s daily life, especially when you are talking about storage hardware. But, there’s a good reason for it – planning a storage hardware refresh can be characterized as a major and daunting task. The questions are endless, but there’s a common answer to all of them.

The Top Whitepapers of 2018

1. Smarter Storage Management Series eBook
   Organizations are creating huge amounts of data but how and where are they going to store it all? Answers can be found in this eBook, which includes a series of thought-provoking articles covering critical issues including storage silos, application performance bottlenecks, data fabrics, and the role of hyperconverged infrastructure.
2. The State of Software-Defined Storage, Hyperconverged and Cloud Storage: Seventh Annual Market Survey
   DataCore’s seventh consecutive market survey explored the impact of software-driven storage deployments within leading organizations to reveal how IT leaders are implementing or planning to implement solutions that maximize IT infrastructure performance, availability, and utilization. The report detailed unique insights from 400 IT professionals about how they are currently using or evaluating software-defined, hyperconverged, and cloud storage to solve their most critical data storage challenges.
3. The Top 10 Reasons To Adopt Software-Defined Storage
   DataCore delivers a software-defined architecture that empowers existing and new storage investments with greater performance, availability and functionality. We decided to poll our customers to learn what motivated them to adopt software-defined storage.
4. Deploying Mission-Critical Business Workloads on Hyperconverged Infrastructure with DataCore Parallel I/O Technology
   Hyperconverged holds the promise of helping consolidate your infrastructure. It can seem like the “easy button” to deploying storage in remote locations or for VDI—but “easy” often comes with tradeoffs. This free IDC report takes a look at the limitations of hyper-converged and how you can get more.
5. Top 3 Challenges Impacting Your Data and How to Solve Them
   Data demands have grown exponentially more difficult for IT departments to manage. Companies that fail to address this new reality risk not only data outages, but a significant loss of business. This white paper reviews the top three critical challenges impacting your data (maintaining uninterrupted service, scaling with increased capacity, and improving storage performance) and how to solve them.

The Top Webinars of 2018

1. NVMe and Flash – Make Your Storage Great Again!
   NVMe and all-flash systems can solve many performance, floor space and energy problems. But you may ask: Do I need to rip and replace existing storage? What is the best way to integrate both? What benefits do I receive? Listen to this on-demand webinar to learn how to get the most out of these technologies, how to integrate flash over NVMe in real life, and more.
2. How to Avoid Disasters via Software-Defined Storage Replication & Site Recovery
   Shifting weather patterns across the globe force us to re-evaluate data protection practices in locations we once thought immune from hurricanes, flooding and other natural disasters. In this webcast and demo, you’ll learn about the offsite data replication combined with advanced site recovery methods that should top your list.
3. How to Easily Migrate Data Without Downtime
   Any change to your IT infrastructure is a major challenge, and typically requires complex data migrations, resulting in service downtime, overtime and more money to spend – but are the results worth it? This brief webinar and demo details how simple it is to bring software-defined storage into your IT environment and leverage chained migration.
4. Zero Downtime, Zero Touch Stretch Clusters from Software-Defined Storage
   Business continuity, especially across data centers in nearby locations, often depends on complicated scripts, manual intervention and numerous checklists. Those error-prone processes are exponentially more difficult when the data storage equipment differs between sites. Such difficulties force many organizations to settle for partial disaster recovery measures, conceding data loss and hours of downtime during occasional facility outages.
5. Hyperconvergence 101 – Getting Started with Hyperconvergence
   While hyperconvergence aims to make the datacenter more efficient, it can also be confusing at times, due to the numerous forms of HCI, the different approaches, and the varying levels of efficiency that can be gained. This exclusive educational event covers what hyperconvergence really is, how it works from install to administration, and how it can help your company.

Curious to see what DataCore users are raving about? Request a live demo today!