Understanding the accumulation of data
Native Format Optimization (NFO) makes a lot of sense, since it addresses a common user error in a practical way, and allows capacity savings to “trickle-down” to backups, e-mail systems, and archives. But wholesale compression and the duplication of primary storage may not be worth much, especially since the cost of disk keeps dropping dramatically.
If VMware aims to transform storage presentation, and is working with major storage vendors to make it happen, HDS ought to be part of it. Their history, technology, and market position earn them a spot in the “VAAI Cabal” and their omission was a bombshell to industry-watchers like me.
Last week, I let the cat out of the bag regarding the next Tech Field Day event, which kicks off in just three days! Today, let’s take a look at the great lineup of companies that will be presenting at this event. Many are new startups, including Nutanix, Pure Storage, and SolidFire, while others are more established, like Nasuni, Symantec, DataDirect Networks, Arista and Arkeia.
It seems that hardware vendors are finally answering the call of Mac users seeking to use Thunderbolt as a generic interface for expansion cards. Last week, Magma, best known for its line of PCI express expansion chassis, announced a three board Thunderbolt version, the ExpressBox 3T. Although the company has not yet released timing and pricing, they are signing up prospective customers on their website.
Earlier this week, Hitachi GST (soon to be part of Western Digital) announced they would soon ship a 1 TB single-platter hard disk drive. But archrival Seagate rained on their parade financing immediate shipment of their own 4 TB unit. With the industry consolidating rapidly, it’s good to see healthy competition among the two remaining hard disk drive giants.
Huawei Symantec is being unfairly targeted based on its parentage, its name, and its national origin. There is absolutely no evidence presented, only vague suggestions and generalizations about China, and their accusers are a handful of ultraconservative congressmen. There is no reason to put any faith whatsoever in these allegations.
We are finalizing our eighth Tech Field Day Event (and tenth event overall) which is coming up in the middle of September. Once again, we have a great batch of new and returning delegates. And once again, many of the presenters share intriguing characteristics. This time, it looks like we will have something of a storage focus!
Later this month, I will be heading to New York for TechTarget’s Storage Decisions conference. I will have two presentations on data reduction and storage virtualization in the main conference track. Registration is free for qualified end-users, and I urge you to attend on September 19 and 20, 2011.
The next date in my Storage for Virtual Environments seminar series is rapidly approaching, and I hope to see my Pacific Northwest readers there! I’ve made even more changes to the seminar content, adding more about vSphere 5 and including new VAAI and partition alignment info. There’s never enough time for everything I want to cover, of course.
I do not necessarily endorse or recommend FalconStor NSS over competing products from more familiar names, but I commend them for adding VAAI support. There the first small vendor to do so, and their software virtualization platform spreads the availability of this important software capability.
This week, two blog readers let me know what Google Chrome was warning them of malware on my blog. I dived in and discovered that, indeed, a nasty, obfuscated JavaScript attack had made its way into my site. Although I was disappointed by the lack of clarity about how to fix it, I believe I was able to remove it last night.
Although Clear clearly wants buyers to sign up for monthly service, they also have “secret” on-demand 2-hour, daily, and weekly plans. Here’s how to get online cheap!
HP stumbled mightily in 2011, and it had nothing to do with product or people. Even sales remained strong, though the PC business is changing. HP’s mighty stumble was a crisis of confidence due to a chain of shenanigans at the very top. This culminated with the short reign of Léo Apotheker, leaving HP to reassure the market of its strategy.
For a massive IT company, Dell sure doesn’t get the kind of respect given their competitors. Time and again, I’ll hear the sneers about Dell being little more than a “box shifter” who doesn’t “get” real enterprise IT needs. After a series of acquisitions in storage and networking, Dell is trying to stake a claim as a serious competitor to HP, IBM, Oracle, and the like. But why should anyone take Dell seriously, especially in enterprise storage?
Any time OS X corrects your spelling or (more likely) inserts appropriate accent marks, Dictate loses its mind and can no longer correctly enter some random letter. There are two ways to fix this problem (apart from just restarting Dictate all the time).
Moving cold virtual machine images from system to system, or even across great distances, is one of the main selling points of server virtualization. But it becomes much more difficult to manage movement of virtual machines that are still running, especially outside cluster or across WAN links. When talking about virtual machine mobility, it is important to consider what is being moved, the state it is in, and where it is going.
The difference between American and European mobile phone providers are vast, and the modern traveler is likely to run afoul if they are unprepared, running up a surprisingly large bill! Here’s a rundown of my standard techniques to prepare my American mobile phone for travel abroad.
The CompactFlash Association announced a new media card format last month, and now Sony and Nikon have introduced the first media and digital cameras, respectively. But what exactly is an XQD memory card? Read on for the details.
What elements remain unresolved to make FCoE truly world-class? What should the vendors be prioritizing?
Although they are ridiculously inefficient, incandescent lightbulbs seem to have a huge number of fans. Despite the romance of the glowing filament, many governments are moving to ban the use of incandescent light bulbs in many applications. Here in the United States, the federal government intends to encourage the use of more efficient light bulbs but there is no outright ban.