Can’t Get There From Here
Posted by Stephen in Personal on 30. Nov, 2008 | Comments
I’m currently making my travel plans for my final storage virtualization seminar. Or, to be precise, trying to make my plans. You see, apparently one cannot (reasonably) get from Cleveland to Toronto, even though they’re only 193 miles apart.
Want a direct flight? That’ll be $1,080 round trip on an Air Canada Dash-8. But it only [...]
Physical Security for the Road Warrior
Posted by Stephen in Personal on 30. Nov, 2008 | Comments
This is part of an ongoing series of longer articles I am posting on Sundays.
In this digital age, it is easy to overlook the critical element of physical security. Put simply, it is often far more efficient to steal or gain access to a physical object like a laptop or flash drive than to break [...]
Storage Folks Are Talking 10-Gig and FCoE
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 21. Nov, 2008 | Comments
I continue to be amazed by the level of interest I’m seeing in Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and 10 Gb Converged Ethernet among storage people. As I noted after my Charlotte virtualization seminar, end users at the largest enterprises seem to think that FCoE is their future, not just one of several options.
But when [...]
Top Ten Innovative Enterprise Storage Hardware Products
Posted by Stephen in Computer history, Enterprise storage on 15. Nov, 2008 | Comments
Looking around at the enterprise storage landscape, it is plain that certain archetypes rule: Monolithic enterprise arrays, dual-controller modular arrays, standard-sized hard disk units, NAS servers, tape libraries. Are these really the optimal designs for storage in our modern open systems world?
On the contrary, I suggest that the enterprise storage world we know was shaped [...]
Making Plans for Storage Decision San Francisco
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Personal, Virtual Storage on 14. Nov, 2008 | Comments
Next week is the final Storage Decisions conference of 2008, Storage Decisions San Francisco! I’ll be in the Bay area from Sunday night through Wednesday, and invite you to say hello if you’re in the area as well!
If you’re attending the conference, here’s my schedule:
Monday, 9:45 AM – 10:45 AM: DATA RETENTION & RETRIEVAL track: [...]
BackType Is Closing The Blog Comment Hole
Posted by Stephen in Personal on 13. Nov, 2008 | Comments
I am an avid reader of RSS feeds, relying on Google Reader to keep me up to date with the latest industry news. But there is a hole in the world of blogs – comments are a dead end. I literally read hundreds of blogs and occasionally leave a comment, but I rarely go back [...]
EMC Atmos Versus VMware VDC-OS: Will The Real Cloud Strategy Please Stand Up?
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 10. Nov, 2008 | Comments
As I guessed on Friday, EMC has officially announced their Maui Atmos software layer today, calling it the “industry’s first COS (cloud-optimized storage) offering”, “a new era for IT”, and “a new category of storage.” So the new era for IT is a cloud with globally-distributed object stores with policy management?
Great! But I thought the [...]
Flash Forward or Flash Back?
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Computer history, Enterprise storage on 08. Nov, 2008 | Comments
This is part of an ongoing series of longer articles I am posting every Sunday.
The tech industry has been buzzing about solid state drives (SSDs) again lately, but many questions remain. Even after many major vendors (Apple, EMC, and Dell to name a few) have introduced NAND flash-based disk into their core products, it is unclear [...]
EMC About To Take Us To Maui…
Posted by Stephen in Computer history, Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 07. Nov, 2008 | Comments
Update: Maui is now Atmos! See my post, EMC Atmos Versus VMware VDC-OS: Will The Real Cloud Strategy Please Stand Up?
Remember all the talk about a year ago about EMC’s mysterious new storage product, code-name “Maui”? It was teased and pulled by Storagezilla, and rumored by one and all… Well, it wasn’t at EMC World, and [...]
Storage Changes in VMware ESX 3.5 Update 3
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 07. Nov, 2008 | Comments
Just over three months after releasing Update 2 for ESX 3.5, VMware has released Update 3. That last Update brought major storage changes like VSS support, hot VMFS extension, Storage VMotion across Fibre Channel and iSCSI, and support for 10 Gb Ethernet and 8 Gb FC support.
For more information on Update 2, see my article, Storage [...]
