Understanding the accumulation of data
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?
On the storage side, arrays can only use the information they have to deallocate: The data that’s stored on them. They don’t know what application is using it, what file system it is. But, somewhere along the line, someone had a big idea and said, “wait a second, what if we look for pages that are all zeros?” We’ll talk about pages a bit later, but for now, let’s talk about zeros. A zero is kind of a smoke signal coming up from over the hills that says, “there’s nothing valuable here.”
This regular series features highlights from the week. The big news for me was Wednesday’s announcement of Tech Field Day 5 in February, though others might have been paying attention to Dell’s acquisition of Compellent. I also continued my series on Light Peak by musing about combining Light Peak and USB 3.0 and pondering, what if Light Peak was electrical rather than optical?
One of the amusing aspects of being self-employed is watching all the giants battle it out. Every company is gunning for someone, but the amazing thing is that they rarely have each other in their sights: NetApp is gunning for EMC who’s more focused on HP who wants to knock off Oracle who’s fixated on IBM. It sounds very “high school romance” but this is deadly-serious business.
This week I started getting to know a whole bunch of wireless geeks in preparation for Wireless Field Day in March. I also wrote about Light Peak, my search for an AirPrint-compatible printer, and some more on the iPad. On the enterprise IT side, I covered Application Performance Monitoring (with a special offer from SolarWinds) and Dell’s potential acquisition of Compellent.
Today is the (a?) day of reckoning in the 3Par saga, with Dell widely expected to make a counter-offer higher than HP’s bid. But this mega deal, like the Data Domain war before it, sends a strong signal to the enterprise IT world: It’s open season on data storage companies! But the rising superpowers are also likely looking at networking as an area of expansion. The game is afoot!
The storage industry got a lot more competitive this morning, as Dell announced plans to buy 3Par. This is the latest round in a well-established race for the enterprise storage dollar, challenging superpower (and Dell partner) EMC in the high-end SAN space. What does this acquisition say about the industry as a whole? Where are we headed?
Industry veterans fondly remember the LAN wars of the early 1990′s, when a diverse set of excellent data link protocols competed for dominance. Although the victory seemed to have gone to Ethernet, industry insiders are looking for a resurgence of better alternatives. One technology, Token Ring, is undeniably superior for transporting modern protocols, especially Fibre Channel for storage. Let’s take a look!
I’ll be reporting live and direct all week from the vicinity of Seattle, WA at Gestalt IT’s Tech Field Day Seattle. I’m organizing this “co-op analyst day for bloggers” event series, and I’m so pleased with how it’s come out. Read on to learn more about the event, the folks, and how you can be a part of it!
The new Nimbus Data E-Class comes just at the right moment, with 500 TB of capacity, a fully redundant “dual active” controller architecture, massive performance (even InfiniBand), and complete feature set (once VAAI is released).
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?