Iomega’s ix4-200d: A Killer Desktop Storage Array
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Enterprise storage, Everything, Personal, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage on 27. Aug, 2009 | View Comments
Iomega is well into its second coming as EMC’s entry-level storage division. First, they applied EMC’s compact and full-featured LifeLine home storage software to existing gear, giving birth to the Home Media Network Hard Drive, StorCenter ix2, and StorCenter Pro ix4-100. Then they wooed the small-business community with the rack-mount StorCenter ix4-200r, adding iSCSI target [...]
EMC LifeLine Spreads To The Iomega StorCenter Pro ix4-100
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage on 05. Feb, 2009 | View Comments
As I expected, EMC’s Iomega subsidiary today rolled out the StorCenter Pro ix4-100 a big brother to the popular but plain StorCenter ix2 NAS device. This new model add hot-swappable drives (there are four now), RAID-5, and a longer warranty to make it suitable for small office use. It uses a blacked-out version of the [...]
Storage Utilization Remains at 2001 Levels: Low!
Posted by Stephen in Computer history, Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage on 13. Jan, 2009 | View Comments
I’ve been talking about storage capacity utilization for my entire career, but the storage industry doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere. Every year or so, a new study is performed showing that half of storage capacity in the data center is unused. And every time there is a predictable (and poorly thought through) “networked storage is [...]
EMC Makes Iomega Relevant Again
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage on 07. Jan, 2009 | View Comments
Pity poor old Iomega. The company responsible for hot products like the Zip drive and coulda-beens like the Clik drive was stumbling in the early part of this decade, unable to distinguish itself from all of the other providers of commodity external storage devices for consumers. Although the company had built the Zip into a [...]
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 [...]
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.
Granularity: The Hidden Challenge of Storage Management
Posted by Stephen in Computer history, Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 05. Oct, 2008 | View Comments
Many storage challenges focus on the conflict between data management, which demands an ever-smaller unit of management, and storage management, which benefits most from consolidation. Developing data management capability that is both granular enough for applications and scalable enough for storage is one key to the future of storage.
We Need a Storage Revolution
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Computer history, Enterprise storage on 28. Sep, 2008 | View Comments
Storage protocols continue to mimic direct attached storage, with the concepts of block and file at its core. No amount of virtualization, and no new protocol, will fix this – we need a storage revolution.
A Consultant’s View Of The Enterprise Storage Market
Posted by Stephen in Computer history, Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 21. Sep, 2008 | View Comments
This is part of an ongoing series of longer articles I will be posting every Sunday as part of an experiment in offering more in-depth content.
I am not the typical enterprise storage user. In fact, I am not an enterprise storage user at all – I am a consultant focused for over a decade on [...]
Drobo 2: Apple Doesn’t Fall Far From the Tree
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Terabyte home on 08. Jul, 2008 | View Comments
Data Robotics today introduced the second generation of what I think of as a personal storage array, but although the Drobo 2 offers great enhancements, making it a top choice for those needing massive and protected storage on a single computer, it’s still not what I’m looking for in a home storage device.
