May 19, 2012

Making Plans for Storage Decision San Francisco

Next week is the final Storage Decisions conference of 2008, Storage Decisions San Francisco! I’ll be in the Bay area from Sunday night through Wednesday, and invite you to say hello if you’re in the area as well! If you’re attending the conference, here’s my schedule: Monday, 9:45 AM – 10:45 AM: DATA RETENTION & [...]

EMC About To Take Us To Maui…

Update: Maui is now Atmos! See my post, EMC Atmos Versus VMware VDC-OS: Will The Real Cloud Strategy Please Stand Up? Remember all the talk about a year ago about EMC’s mysterious new storage product, code-name “Maui”? It was teased and pulled by Storagezilla, and rumored by one and all… Well, it wasn’t at EMC World, [...]

Storage Virtualization Charlotte: Thoughts and Reactions

Charlotte skyline

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 [...]

Compellent Does Enterprise SSD Right

Yes! Compellent has just announced at Storage Networking World that they’ll be adding enterprise solid state drives (SSDs) to their excellent fully-virtualized storage arrays. Why is this worth shouting about? Simply because their automated block-based tiered storage architecture ought to be able to really take full advantage of the performance offered by SSDs. If you’ll [...]

Storage Decisions New York 2008 Presentations Now Available

My pal, Greg Schulz, just pointed out that TechTarget has posted the presentations from Storage Decisions New York 2008. If you were there, you might have tried to figure out how to download the presentations at the kiosk/table in the lobby. I couldn’t figure it out, myself, though! So you might want to head over [...]

The Storage Utilization Waterfall: Raw, Usable, and Used

Based on Floral Matryoshka by BrokenSphere/Wikimedia Commons

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 [...]

Storage Decisions New York 2008 Feedback

Key takeaways from my Storage Decisions New York 2008 sessions: segment email archives, get legal involved on retention policy, consider the impact of VMware VDC-OS

Turning the Page on RAID

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. It has been the core technology behind the storage industry since day one, but the sun is setting on traditional RAID technology. After two decades of refinement and fragmentation, we are [...]

Storage Decisions New York is Right Around the Corner

There is nothing like presenting in the ballroom at the Hilton Chicago!

Storage Decisions returns to New York later this month, and I’ll be happy to be there. Although the Hilton New York isn’t as grand as the Chicago venue pictured, it’s still a great location and a better event! This time around, I’ll have two sessions: Tuesday, September 23, at 1:45 PM is my Deep Dive Into [...]

Which Storage Protocol For VMware?

I had two great storage virtualization seminars this week, in New York and Philadelphia.  As usual, audience participation was key, and interest in VMware and Hyper-V remains high. One of the main questions I always get is which protocol one should use for VMware storage. My recommendation remains that the answer is an organizational one [...]