How do self-encrypting drives fit into an open source storage server? Well, before we dive into the premise of this blog, for those of you not familiar with SED drives, here’s a quick overview: What is a self-encrypting drive? A self-encrypting drive (SED) is a hard drive or a solid-state drive that encrypts itself. How does a self-encrypting drive work?…
Ransomware. It’s a word we’re being inundated with everywhere we turn. And rightfully so. Over the last few years, it has become more and more prevalent. And definitely a bigger concern for IT departments. Every week, it seems like we read another news story about the latest attack on an organization — sizes aren’t spared, either. Ransomware attacks are happening…
From customers to social channels, we've listened to your feedback to improve our server administration software, Houston. Today, we're excited to share our new Houston updates and features in this blog. Along with the updates, I also want to talk about the history of Houston and why it was important for us to build an easy-to-use system to manage data…
Let’s talk about a perfect pair — Proxmox and Houston UI. You’ve most likely heard us talk about Proxmox before, especially recently — now that we officially offer and support Proxmox on our 45Drives servers. We’ve been using Proxmox as our open source virtualization platform — particularly for our Ceph deployments, using Ceph’s RBDs, mounting them into Proxmox, then using…
Virtualization is an exciting technology that offers many potential benefits to a massive range of applications. Virtualization as a concept is ancient – it has been around for years, and its current position in the storage world is well established. However, in many cases, we’ve seen people who could be benefiting from it but perhaps fear the learning curve or…
Virtualization adds an abstraction layer between physical hardware and the systems and programs interacting with it. Having a virtual layer between your software and hardware provides huge benefits to many applications and potential future-proofing, flexibility, and resiliency to many more. There are a few big names in the virtualization world, and the largest proprietary virtualization software is widely adopted. However,…
You may have heard that Redhat is ending CentOS as the downstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) rebuild and repositioning it as an upstream build of RHEL. At 45Drives, we had a choice to make – what would be our new primary operating system (OS)? Why we moved away from CentOS/RedHat First, let's talk about why we needed to move…
How great would it be to have a simple way to manage and maintain your storage infrastructure? Good news, our engineers have been working on making that happen and we’re happy to say Houston UI is now a go! Houston provides a management layer you can use to interface with 45Drives products. It gives you a single viewpoint of your…
* Shortly after we released this blog Red Hat made the decision to kill off CentOS 8. Check out this video where we explain more about this topic. If you follow 45Drives, you’ve probably heard us mention Ceph - the premier open-source clustering software. Ceph links multiple storage servers together over a network to act as one large single unit.…
The storage landscape If you are looking to store a lot of data, basically there are two options. The Cloud is out. As anyone who has seriously considered it can tell you, the Cloud costs way too much once you have a large enough amount of data. The remaining two options involve purchasing a physical device to store your data, either…