Drobo, XP Users: Beware of 4K “Advanced Format” Drives!
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Computer history, Enterprise storage, Everything, Terabyte home on 23. Dec, 2009 | View Comments
Personal computer hard disk drive access methods have been repeatedly forced to adapt to ever-expanding capacity. But Western Digital is leading the change to larger 4 kilobyte hard disk blocks. Although this new “Advanced Format” includes mechanisms for backwards compatibility, buyers should be wary of these new drives for the time being.
Tuning Lighttpd For Linux
Posted by Stephen in Personal on 29. Jun, 2009 | View Comments
As I mentioned on Friday, I’ve recently built a multi-server web hosting environment around lighttpd, MySQL, and Ubuntu Linux. Ironically, my lighttpd web server slowed to a crawl that very evening! It turns out that I had not properly tuned lighttpd to function in a Linux environment. I was surprised to find that the Ubuntu [...]
Setting Up a Multi-Server Web Hosting Environment
Posted by Stephen in Personal on 26. Jun, 2009 | View Comments
The last few weeks have been tough on my web servers. The release of iPhone OS 3.0 tripled my site traffic overnight as folks investigate the new Exchange integration features, and traffic to IT commentary site, Gestalt IT, which I also host, has been growing rapidly. Plus, Google just refreshed PageRank again, sending even more [...]
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 [...]
Iomega Grows Up and Moves Out of the House
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage on 16. Apr, 2009 | View Comments
Iomega’s StorCenter Pro ix4-200r sports iSCSI and NAS plus VMware ESX support – it’s a small business or lab monster!
Iomega has been a staple of the desktop computing environment for decades, but the company’s products have never been quite at home in even small corporate data centers. That changes today with the introduction of the [...]
The Future of Home Storage
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Computer history, Terabyte home on 12. Oct, 2008 | View Comments
Consumers demand friendly, flexible solutions. They don’t want to fuss with their media, and they don’t want simple shared storage. They want integration with multiple devices and flexibility to access their content on any device.
Sun’s Excellent VirtualBox Goes 2.0
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Virtual Storage on 04. Sep, 2008 | View Comments
Today, Sun released VirtualBox 2.0, a major revision to the (partially open source) desktop virtualization software. I have long used VirtualBox on my Windows machines as my virtualization product of choice due to its compactness, functionality, and low impact on the host system. Although I’m happy with VMware Fusion on the Mac, I intend to [...]
Living in a Copyrighted World
Posted by Stephen in Computer history, Enterprise storage, Personal on 10. Jan, 2008 | View Comments
Techdirt’s I Learned It From Watching YOU, Big Content, pointed me to a Washington Post story, Hey, Isn’t That… about how the big old media companies have been repeatedly caught with their pants down, stealing content from us little guys. This got me thinking again about my own similar experiences.
See, I’ve had my work ripped [...]
Where is Linux in Storage?
Posted by Stephen in Computer history, Enterprise storage, Everything on 20. Jul, 2007 | View Comments
Marc Farley’s challenge of listing all the devices on our home networks got me thinking –I’ve got an awful lot of Linux devices, but all of them are infrastructure rather than interactive PCs. Of the 10 devices currently attached my home network, four are Linux based (two TiVos, a Linksys router, and Linksys NAS), three [...]
Hybrid Drives Are Here – But they’re Irrelevant to Enterprise Storage
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Terabyte home on 19. Jul, 2007 | View 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” [...]
