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The history of computing
This world of cloud computing sure can seem cloudy. Last night at CloudCamp Columbus, I led a session outlining the incredible differences between the diverse offerings all called cloud storage. How can companies like Amazon, Nirvanix, Rackspace, EMC, and the rest use the same name for such vastly different products? Continue Reading »
The race to ship a 500 GB mobile hard disk drive unit was heated last year. Hitachi was first to announce a fat 12.5 mm drive in January, but Samsung and Western Digital fought a pitched battle through the second half of the year to produce serious volume in a the slim 9.5 mm 2-platter form factor. 320 GB and 500 GB became common in the first half of 2009, with vendors adding a baby-step 400 GB size as well.
Until this month, all four major disk vendors have remained silent on the step past the half-terabyte barrier, however. Certainly any could have slapped together a 640 GB, 750 GB, or even 1 TB 4-platter semi-mobile disk drive using existing technology, as Hitachi did last year, but no such announcement came. But the break just came: Seagate has quietly added a 640 GB model to their 2.5 inch FreeAgent Go portable disk drive line. There was no press release, but this is a major step forward. Continue Reading »
Google is the most important company to the Internet. Hyberbole? I think not! Without Google, the Internet that we all know and love would be a very different place, as would the business of IT. Along with Microsoft and the supporting community around LAMP, Google is the very foundation of modern computing. But the foundation of Google itself, its ability to rank Internet content and present relevant information to its users, is at risk. What will they do to fix it?
Hiding in the shadow of the huge VMware vSphere 4 announcement was a very interesting introduction by EMC: PowerPath/VE. As I mentioned in my post on storage changes in vSphere 4, PowerPath/VE plugs into the new pluggable storage architecture (PSA) found in vSphere 4 versions of ESX and takes over the decision-making and heavy-lifting tasks related to communicating with storage systems. Continue Reading »
IT infrastructure is following consumer technology out of the data center glass house and into the wide world
Dave Hitz over at NetApp poses a very interesting question: What is the ten-year trend in information technology that we are currently building to? He supplies these historical examples:
He then goes on to suggest three ten-year trends that we might currently be living through:
Although I agree on the importance of these three to enterprise IT, I don’t think they’ll be seen as the megatrends of this decade in hindsight. I suggest that, more than anything, we are witnessing a wholesale shift from information tied to place/device to information mobility. Cloud computing, server virtualization, and even flash memory are all contributors to this massive trend, along with the user-side trends of the post-PDA mobile phone, 3G data, social web services, and connected home.
I’ve been talking about storage capacity utilization for my entire career, but the storage industry doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere. Every year or so, a new study is performed showing that half of storage capacity in the data center is unused. And every time there is a predictable (and poorly thought through) “networked storage is a waste of time” response.
The good news is that this is no longer a technical problem: Modern virtualized and networked servers ought to have decent utilization of storage capacity, and technology is improving all the time. Consider the compounded impact of modern technology on storage capacity utilization:
So why don’t things get better? It’s hard to be sure why people don’t use these pervasive tools to improve storage utilization, but I do have some ideas… Continue Reading »
Just a quick note: Google’s Amit Singh recently introduced a new addition to the MacFUSE user-space filesystem software for OS X: AncientFS allows the Mac to read a host of archaic file systems and data container formats, from DECtape to Dump to the various flavors of the standard UNIX file system.
This ought to be useful for those of us who have standardized our desktops on OS X yet still maintain a variety of old data storage systems and archives.
Storage magazine: seven years' proof of excellence
All things must pass, but it is with a heavy heart that I note that TechTarget’s excellent Storage magazine has shipped its last issue. No official word has been posted by the company, but it is now widely reported. All print publications are feeling squeezed by a move to online readership which robs print of advertising revenue with its quicker turnaround and lower cost. Like its ancestor, Byte, and PC Magazine, Storage will continue online at searchstorage.com as well as through a controlled-circulation PDF newsletter. I do not yet know which of the excellent staff (writers, illustrators, and editors) of Storage will remain with these online efforts.
EMC’s Chuck Hollis is one smart guy, and a very verbose blogger. As usual, he sparked a bit of a storm recently when comparing unified storage on EMC’s Celerra NX4 to NetApp’s multiprotocol FAS2020 filer. But it was one phrase in particular that got the attention of Alex McDonald and Kostadis Russos of NetApp, Martin/Storagebod, and Tony Asaro: “just because a vendor says they can emulate FC SAN behavior doesn’t mean it’s a real FC SAN.”
What was he getting at? Read the comments in Chuck’s post and you’ll understand his implication: Chuck suggests that NetApp “emulates” Fibre Channel in their FAS/OnTap devices on top of the WAFL “file system”, while EMC’s AX storage (behind the NX4) uses “real” Fibre Channel, so it’s better. He goes on to say that EMC is doing a brisk business replacing misfit NetApp FC arrays with real FC kit from EMC. But, as is so often the case, the truth is a little more complex than this: All enterprise storage arrays “emulate” Fibre Channel drives to one extent or another, and using the wrong tool for the job will always lead to trouble.
This is the second entry in my Top-Ten in Storage series.
Not every innovative product can succeed in the market, and no matter how good some ideas seem, they can fail to make much of an impact. The truth is, people buy solutions, not technologies.
This list includes products so cool, so ahead of their time, that they just couldn’t fail. But they did.
