If Storage Vendors Were Automakers…
Posted by Stephen in Computer history, Enterprise storage, Personal on 07. Aug, 2009 | View Comments
If the enterprise storage market was the auto market, who would be who?*
Back From the Pile: Interesting Content From the Week of May 2, 2009
Posted by Stephen in Everything on 04. May, 2009 | View Comments
There were some interesting events and blog posts last week. This new weekly feature highlights those!
Enterprise IT
Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle Your Reliance On Backup Tapes – What’s wrong with backup tapes? They’re inaccessible, making them unsuitable for most applications. My latest post for my Enterprise Storage Strategies blog.
Is Licensing Turning vSphere Into Vista? – A [...]
Storage Changes in VMware ESX 3.5 Update 4
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage on 31. Mar, 2009 | View Comments
Like clockwork, VMware has cranked out another update to their flagship enterprise product, ESX 3.5. The last update came out in early November, 2008, and included some major new functionality. What’s in store this time to intrigue storage folks? Not much.
For more information on earlier updates, see my articles:
Storage Fixes in VMware ESX Server 3.5 [...]
Consulting Is A Perilous Business But Credibility Is What Matters
Posted by Stephen in Personal on 26. Mar, 2009 | View Comments
I’ve called myself a “vendor-independent storage consultant” for more than a decade now, but my good friend, Greg Schultz, recently challenged me on that statement. Sure, I haven’t worked for a vendor of tin boxes and spinning rust, or the software that runs the stuff, but I’m firmly rooted in the supply side of things. [...]
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Storage Automation
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage on 09. Feb, 2009 | View 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 [...]
Of Emulated Fibre Channel, Virtualization, And The Right Tool For The Job
Posted by Stephen in Computer history, Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage on 12. Dec, 2008 | View Comments
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 [...]
Top Ten Coolest Enterprise Storage Flops
Posted by Stephen in Computer history, Enterprise storage on 06. Dec, 2008 | View Comments
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 [...]
Storage Folks Are Twittering
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Personal on 05. Dec, 2008 | View Comments
If reading blogs doesn’t give you your enterprise storage fix, there’s a new option in town: Twitter!
Lots of the top folks in the enterprise storage community are now using the microblogging service, and a regular community has evolved. It’s really taken off over the past few months.
If you’re interested in enterprise storage, here’s a short [...]
3PAR Reserves A Seat At The Solid State Disk Drive Table
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 28. Oct, 2008 | View Comments
3PAR will use flash as “tier-0″ storage in their InServe arrays and is in the “flash is a drive” camp
Symantec’s Thin API: The Plot Thickens
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 24. Oct, 2008 | View Comments
Last week, I lauded Symantec for introducing an API in Storage Foundation which will interact with the thin storage capabilities of supported arrays. Since then, I’ve learned more about this capability, and I am writing this update to share that knowledge. As I noted last week, the press release was a bit hard to follow and [...]
