Symantec announced availability of the latest NetBackup revision today, version 6.5. This release is nearly complete in its buzzword-compliance, with enhanced support for VTL and backup to disk, data deduplication, CDP, LAN-free backup, SharePoint and Exchange, and even VMware! What’s the matter, Symantec, was Thin Provisioning not ready for release? How about green computing? Holographic [...]
Yowza! VMware is a Rocket!
August 14, 2007 By 1 Comment
Commercial SSDs Are Here?
August 14, 2007 By 11 Comments
Anyone paying attention knows I’m not particular sanguine about the near-term prospects for solid-state disks (SSDs) and hybrid hard disk drives (H-HDDs) in the enterprise storage space, but I’m not foolish enough to discount them entirely. With that in mind, it’s worthwhile noting the debut of the first commercially-available retail(ish) SATA SSD from SanDisk. Read [...]
Garth Gibson: Still Relevant After All These Years
August 13, 2007 By Leave a Comment
Garth Gibson, author of the seminal paper which presented the redundant array of inexpensive independent disks (RAID) to the world, has a nice quick interview over at eWeek. It’s worth a read, since Gibson’s long been on the forefront of storage tech. He talks about how parallel NFS (pNFS) is set to trickle down to [...]
DRM Lock-In Becomes Lock-Out
August 13, 2007 By Leave a Comment
Next time someone trots out the old argument that “only pirates hate digital rights management (DRM),” just point out what just happened at the old Googleplex. They just canceled their pay-per-download Google Video site and locked everyone out of the content that they legally paid for. We all knew this could happen with DRM, and [...]
Thoughts on Mark Lewis’ Future Storage
August 8, 2007 By 2 Comments
Emulex and QLogic Learn to Speak Klingon!
August 8, 2007 By Leave a Comment
Well, not exactly Klingon, but both Host Bus Adapter powerhouses chose today to announce 8 Gb/s Fibre Channel HBAs. This would be somewhat more exciting if there was any device these high-speed adapters could speak to. But switches, arrays, and drives are still a ways off. So for now, Emulex and QLogic can only speak [...]
Reyes Found Guilty On All Counts
August 7, 2007 By Leave a Comment
Water-Cooled Hard Drives
August 7, 2007 By Leave a Comment
It seems that water-cooled storage isn’t just for IBM spinoffs anymore! NEC and Hitachi have unveiled a new water-cooled hard drive module for PCs (in Japan) to keep their drives nice and cool (and quiet, too!) Don’t expect to see this tech widely used, though. It’s way too complex for mainstream application. Once again, in [...]
Specialized Server/Enterprise Hard Drives
August 7, 2007 By 3 Comments
Continuing my overview of the specialized hard drive market, we move on to the world of enterprise hard disk drives. These are performance monsters, with nearly all falling above the 10,000 RPM line that defines “exotic” in the desktop space. They also have a wide variety of interfaces, including parallel and serial SCSI, Fibre Channel, [...]
