I’ve got a new video podcast up and running: Raising the Floor is a series of discussions about the future of enterprise IT. I kicked the series off talking about one of my favorite topics: Cloud storage. It was a pretty broad discussion, all packed into less than half an hour, but I wanted to share a few excerpts.
Overcoming The Limits Of Thin Provisioning With Automatic Provisioning!
November 24, 2010 By 1 Comment
I’ve never been a fan of thin provisioning as a storage management tool. Don’t get me wrong, I love having thin provisioning in my toolkit to overcome the limitations of conventional filesystems. Thin provisioning just gets under my skin when folks try to use it to solve business problems like long deployment time and slow purchasing cycles. If you attended any of the thin provisioning sessions I’ve presented at Storage Decisions, Interop, E-Storm, or elsewhere then you’ve heard my wistful dreaming of real automatic provisioning without the hackery of thin provisioning systems. But perhaps I didn’t mention that actual automatic provisioning actually exists today! It’s one of the many things I love about API-driven cloud storage!
From CAS to Cloud: Revolutionary Storage
October 26, 2010 By 3 Comments
Change is not a word normally associated with storage, and revolution is practically unheard of. Today’s modern enterprise storage systems and networks employ massive resources to do one simple thing: Emulate the basic hard disk drives used over three decades ago. But cracks are appearing in our mausoleum of fake disks: Application developers are discovering the value of object storage, and storage systems are appearing to support this need.
How To Make TimThumb Play Nicely With TanTan’s WordPress S3 Plugin
October 6, 2010 By 1 Comment
I’m loving the Woo theme for this blog, and especially love that they integrated the cool TimThumb script to automatically resize thumbnails for the main page. But everything stopped working when I added TanTan’s Wordpress-S3 plugin to store my images on Amazon’s servers. Luckily, I found a fix!
Review: Will Drobo FS Take The NAS Market By Storm?
April 6, 2010 By 1 Comment
Data Robotics is back with yet another member in the rapidly-expanding Drobo family of “storage robots.” The newly-announced Drobo FS brings gigabit Ethernet, file-sharing protocols, and installable apps to the platform’s industry-leading flexibility and data protection. But Drobo FS is no slam dunk: It’s expensive, not found in (many) stores, and the value proposition can be difficult to comprehend. Will Drobo FS sink or swim?
CommVault Gives Cloud Storage A Seat At The Adult Table
February 1, 2010 By 3 Comments
Only mature technologies are taken seriously and granted equal status when enterprise architectures are defined. That’s why I’m pleased to see today’s announcement that CommVault has completely integrated API-driven public cloud storage with Simpana, their impressive data protection and archiving suite. Now there are three equal backup targets: Tape, disk, and cloud.
Is GDrive Finally Being Launched?
January 12, 2010 By 3 Comments
Today, Google announced that their existing Docs platform will soon open up to storage of all file types. This was widely anticipated, as Google evolved the Docs service over the past year and added references to “Files” rather than specific document types. This could be the next step towards the long-rumored “GDrive” storage offering.
Zend Simple Cloud API = Freedom!
September 22, 2009 By 3 Comments
As I pointed out last week, cloud computing does not need traditional consensus-committee standards, at least not yet. The inherent flexibility and programmability of cloud platforms and applications lends a certain flavor of openness to cloud computing that reduces the requirement for (and thus impact of) standards. Furthermore, the amazing creativity currently being applied to [...]
