The Truth About HP’s Tech Day
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Everything, Gestalt IT, Personal, Virtual Storage on 01. Oct, 2009 | View Comments
HP and Ivy did a darn fine job of putting together a set of sessions to tell us what they have. They presented folks who really knew their stuff, warts and all. They invited a variety of independent voices and let us ask and say anything we wanted with no expectations, let alone an NDA. This was a stellar event, and every other IT company should be asking why they didn’t do it first.
I Can Finally Talk About Windows Storage Server 2008!
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage on 05. May, 2009 | View Comments
I don’t usually “do” NDAs. It’s just too hard to figure out what I’m allowed to say and what I should keep quiet. I prefer to get free and open information, but will settle for embargoed briefings if it means I can get some time to think before reporting. So my Microsoft connection is a [...]
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 [...]
Compression, Encryption, Deduplication, and Replication: Strange Bedfellows
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Personal on 05. Feb, 2009 | View Comments
One of the great ironies of storage technology is the inverse relationship between efficiency and security: Adding performance or reducing storage requirements almost always results in reducing the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of a system.
Many of the advances in capacity utilization put into production over the last few years rely on deduplication of data. This [...]
TechTarget Posts 2009 Event Schedule
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Personal, Virtual Storage on 22. Dec, 2008 | View Comments
Although the details have not been released, TechTarget updated its web site today with a list of events by region for 2009. My understanding is that, although the formats and locations are tweaked slightly, the user-focused character of their excellent Storage Decisions conferences and one-day seminars will remain.
Some highlights from the calendar:
The Storage Decisions conferences [...]
EMC Atmos Versus VMware VDC-OS: Will The Real Cloud Strategy Please Stand Up?
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 10. Nov, 2008 | View Comments
As I guessed on Friday, EMC has officially announced their Maui Atmos software layer today, calling it the “industry’s first COS (cloud-optimized storage) offering”, “a new era for IT”, and “a new category of storage.” So the new era for IT is a cloud with globally-distributed object stores with policy management?
Great! But I thought the [...]
Storage Virtualization Charlotte: Thoughts and Reactions
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Personal, Virtual Storage on 21. Oct, 2008 | View Comments
I’ve just finished my day in Charlotte on my Storage Virtualization Seminar tour for TechTarget. We had another great crowd – everyone seemed interested even if some were shy about speaking up. I was especially pleased to see the optimism about the city’s post-Wachovia future.
Comments at the event focused on management, with my concerns about [...]
The Storage Utilization Waterfall: Raw, Usable, and Used
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 01. Oct, 2008 | View Comments
My February 2003 column for Storage magazine focused on the surprising difficulty of measuring storage utilization. I wrote:
“A true measurement of utilization would reflect every layer of usage metrics – from raw disk in a shared array to used storage within files. Raw storage for each new frame of reference is contained within the [...]
Is Deduplication Ready for Prime Time?
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 25. Sep, 2008 | View Comments
Deduplication is here for backup, but it is not yet ready for prime time in primary storage applications
Deduplication Coming to Primary Storage
Posted by Stephen in Computer history, Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 16. Sep, 2008 | View Comments
This is a follow-up to my story, De-Duplication Goes Mainstream
Although deduplication of storage is nothing new, with Data Domain and other making hay with the technique for years, it has never been ready for prime time – reduction of active primary storage applications like email and databases. Instead, deduplication has been relegated to second- or [...]
