February 10, 2012

Thin Provisioning: Playing the Telephone Game

What happens in the telephone game is that a little bit of information gets lost at each step along the path, and at the end of the chain you’ve basically lost all the information. And this happens all the time in computers, especially in data storage. Thin reclamation is the core technical challenge to thin provisioning, and the telephone game is the reason.

Conference Loot: SNW Orlando 2010 Edition

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I’ve never been a fan of the junky, wasteful side of conference attendance. I railed about “booth babes and chotchkies” last year, and tried to make my presentations qualitatively different. But there is another class of giveaway at conferences: Solid, pricey loot.

We Don’t Need Cloud Standards (Yet)

Championing “open” and calling for standards has become the first stalling action by late-movers in technology spaces. They see opportunity passing by and try to hold back progress and FUD the market by yelling about proprietary solutions, vendor lock-in, and a lack of standards. Many well-intentioned IT folks follow along: After all, who doesn’t want openness, standardization, and interoperability?