As y’all might know, I was pleased to receive recognition from Microsoft for my contributions to the storage community in the form of an MVP award. This award has allowed me to have much more insight into Microsoft’s products behind the scenes, and has helped me immensely in supporting my customers who use Microsoft products [...]
Can the iPhone Sync With Multiple Exchange Servers?
February 26, 2009 By 16 Comments
One of the major advances introduced in iPhone software version 2.0 was the ability to sync over-the-air to Microsoft Exchange servers using Microsoft’s ActiveSync protocol. This was introduced to much fanfare with the iPhone 3G and is available on older updated iPhone and iPod Touch units, too. Google and NuevaSync also offer over-the-air calendar and [...]
Introducing Gestalt IT, a New Web Magazine For Enterprise IT Infrastructure Commentary
February 25, 2009 By 5 Comments
Times are changing in the tech media world, so a core group of independent enterprise IT bloggers have come together to combine our writing into a mega blog or web magazine focused on enterprise IT infrastructure topics like virtualization, networking, and storage: Gestalt IT. The idea is that the best content from the best enterprise IT folks is brought together in one place.
Does Hitachi+SimpleTech = EMC+Iomega?
February 24, 2009 By 5 Comments
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) just bought Fabrik (SimpleTech and G-Technology). So is Hitachi’s combination with SimpleTech a response or challenge to EMC’s acquisition of Iomega? In a word, no.
Nine Blog Suggestions from a Grumpy Reader
February 20, 2009 By 13 Comments
I subscribe to hundreds of RSS feeds, and read them religiously. According to Google Reader’s statistics, I read about 200 items per day out of over 700 posted to all of those feeds. As you might expect, I’ve got some strong feelings about blogs and news sites after reading that much. So this message is aimed at all of you content providers out there: Fix your darn blogs and feeds so I won’t be so grumpy anymore!
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Storage Automation
February 9, 2009 By 10 Comments
The first storage performance horseman is spindles: If you don’t have enough disk units, performance will suffer. I have been laying out storage on enterprise arrays since the dark ages, and one of the first lessons I learned was allocating data to avoid hotspots. I remember spending hours back in the 1990′s hunched over custom Excel spreadsheets [...]
Apologies For The 404s!
February 7, 2009 By Leave a Comment
I’ve been using Dreamhost as my hosting provider since 2000, mostly happily. But last year I began receiving enough traffic that I could no longer rely on shared hosting. Last Fall, I switched all of my domains to a virtual private server at Dreamhost – an easy upgrade that doubled my hosting bill but promised [...]
Compression, Encryption, Deduplication, and Replication: Strange Bedfellows
February 5, 2009 By 14 Comments
One of the great ironies of storage technology is the inverse relationship between efficiency and security: Adding performance or reducing storage requirements almost always results in reducing the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of a system. Many of the advances in capacity utilization put into production over the last few years rely on deduplication of data. [...]
EMC LifeLine Spreads To The Iomega StorCenter Pro ix4-100
February 5, 2009 By Leave a Comment
As I expected, EMC’s Iomega subsidiary today rolled out the StorCenter Pro ix4-100 a big brother to the popular but plain StorCenter ix2 NAS device. This new model add hot-swappable drives (there are four now), RAID-5, and a longer warranty to make it suitable for small office use. It uses a blacked-out version of the [...]
The Difference Between “Integration” and “Frankenstein”
February 5, 2009 By 2 Comments
When is a solution integrated and when is it a Frankenstein-like mashup of tangled tech? Apparently, that line is crossed when it’s your competitor’s offering… In my time in the storage industry, I’ve seen enough franken-storage come and go to make me skeptical whenever a new “integrated” solution is announced. But a lot of this [...]
