Network Appliance is no more. The company that made the second enterprise storage device I ever used, added the terms “filer” and “appliance” to the enterprise IT lexicon, and long suffered from a confusing array of names, is now officially called NetApp. This is probably a good idea. A company needs a single name, and [...]
ZFS: Super File System!
February 27, 2008 By 2 Comments
ZFS really piques my interest, so I just had to include it in my TechTarget storage virtualization seminar series. Here’s a quick primer for those of you who aren’t familiar with it, and thus are wondering why anyone would get stoked over a filesystem! ZFS (originally “zettabyte file system” but now just ZFS) takes the [...]
Apple Customers Vent Over Ex-Xserve RAID
February 20, 2008 By Leave a Comment
Apple’s business customers do not appear amused at the company’s exit from the enterprise storage space, but it was the quiet way that the company dumped the Xserve RAID product from their lineup that really irked. “XRAID” customers were left wondering whether they made the right choice, and if the company’s support for the defunct [...]
Apple Revs Xsan and Kills Xserve RAID?
February 19, 2008 By 3 Comments
Apple has an odd relationship with enterprise computing. Their Xserve server products are strong, as is Leopard Server, and they have an excellent SAN file system, Xsan, that they just updated. Yet, Mac OS X is the last major operating system with no volume manager (thanks to the antiquated HFS+), and it looks like the [...]
Is Apple Fibbing With Their MacBook Air Renderings?
January 16, 2008 By 2 Comments
Yesterday evening, I began composing an article comparing my experiences a few years back with my sole computer being an ultra-thin notebook quite like the MacBook Air, but ended up at rather a different place. In compositing an image comparing my old Toshiba Portégé 3010CT with the super-thin Apple, I noticed that Apple’s illustrations of [...]
No More CDs
December 17, 2007 By 1 Comment
So yesterday we finished ripping our entire CD collection – we’ve now completed our switch to digital music at home. It’s done. It amuses me to think of the statistics: We have 11,284 tracks stored, including 279 Christmas songs and 549 kids songs! Most songs were ripped using LAME at the VBR3 setting in joint [...]
Google Revs Apps
September 18, 2007 By 4 Comments
If you’re a Google user like I am (in my off-time), you’ll be happy to learn that Google finally made two long-awaited changes today. First up is the addition of presentations to the Google Docs suite. Although Docs still lags well behind the full-featured office suites (especially Microsoft’s unexpectedly great PowerPoint 2007), this addition does [...]
DRM Lock-In Becomes Lock-Out
August 13, 2007 By Leave a Comment
Next time someone trots out the old argument that “only pirates hate digital rights management (DRM),” just point out what just happened at the old Googleplex. They just canceled their pay-per-download Google Video site and locked everyone out of the content that they legally paid for. We all knew this could happen with DRM, and [...]
Wherefore Art Thou, Solid State Disks?
August 2, 2007 By 7 Comments
Sure, hybrid drives are going nowhere fast in enterprise storage. But what about solid state disk technology? It’s been “almost there” for decades – anyone remember EMC’s solid-state Orion Atom (or was it Adam) array? Now a handful of storage players are talking about SSD’s again, including some respectable names like LSI and Xiotech and [...]
Hybrid Drives Are Here – But they’re Irrelevant to Enterprise Storage
July 19, 2007 By 2 Comments
It isn’t every day that a new hard disk technology is introduced, but Samsung recently did just that with the introduction of their SpinPoint MH80. This conventional looking SATA hard drive packs 256 MB of NAND flash memory alongside two conventional platters totaling 160 GB of traditional magnetic storage. Tellingly, it’s a 2.5” laptop drive [...]
