Understanding the accumulation of data
I stepped into a hornet nest this week when I posted a write-up about a new flash storage array from Pure Storage. The controversy had nothing to do with the underlying technology, which seems quite sound. Rather, it was all about pricing, with Pure’s competitors calling foul on their price comparisons.
Why do we care about thin provisioning? Because storage is not getting cheaper. If you went to buy a disk ten years ago, you’re going to spend about the same as would today, but you’re going to get a lot more capacity – a lot more capacity! The fact that we have terrible utilization of enterprise resources is really not helping us, and it’s not getting any better. It hasn’t improved because they are “doing storage” the same way.
Since all the cool companies are offering capacity guarantees these days, I thought I might as well throw my hat into the ring and offer one, too. Starting now, I guarantee any takers an easy plan to write 50% more production data to your existing storage environment. Even better, I’ll do it with no additional hardware or software to purchase and install and no complicated terms and conditions. You won’t even have to delete anything, but if you do I’ll guarantee double your data! And I’ll only charge 50% of the deferred storage hardware and software spend, and if I can’t do it you pay nothing. What have you got to lose?
Corporate IT is at a crossroads. The financial crisis has had a massive impact on budget priorities: Do more with less is the message of the day. But how can this be achieved? Challenges for Enterprise IT I’ve spent 15 years focused on the business of IT, with a special interest in data storage, since [...]
I’m pleased to announce that I will be presenting at all four of TechTarget’s excellent end user-focused 2009 Storage Decisions conferences in North America! I’m also very excited to be developning two entirely new sessions for the show: Tools and Tricks to Manage Capacity – Knowing how much disk capacity you have allocated, how much [...]
Do you really know what is taking up all of your disk space? Unless you have a good tool, the answer is probably not. You might think that your “Documents” folder takes up most of the room, since you use it all the time and it has so many files in it. But even the bloated files produced by Microsoft Office pale in comparison to multimedia photo, music, and video files. And it is usually the folders that you don’t actively manage that are the worst space-wasters!
Last week, I lauded Symantec for introducing an API in Storage Foundation which will interact with the thin storage capabilities of supported arrays. Since then, I’ve learned more about this capability, and I am writing this update to share that knowledge. As I noted last week, the press release was a bit hard to follow and [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
I was thrilled to see the announcement by Blackmagic Design of two Thunderbolt versions of their respected Intensity video input/output box. But which is the better choice, the Intensity Shuttle or Intensity Extreme?
As a parent, especially a techie one, you never know when a teachable moment is going to appear. Last night, I mentioned that I was testing a new Ruckus access point and enthused about how fast it was. My 12-year-old asked, “why is it so fast?” This led to a wonderful discussion about radio waves, congestion and propagation, and spectrum licensing. Yeah, I’m that kind of dad.
Twitter is here to stay, and has become a potent communication tool in many industries. I recently received a request for advice on how better to use Twitter, and thought I would share some of the lessons I’ve learned over the years as an avid IT industry tweeter.
Make no mistake, the Das Keyboard Model S for Mac is a whole class better than the plastic junk most people use, and the snappy Cherry MX blue key switches are more rewarding than any scissor or membrane keyboard out there, but this is no IBM Model M, so buckling spring fans should look elsewhere.
EMC VFCache (née Project Lightning) is a fairly simple offering: A server-based PCIe flash card that acts as a read cache with no integration with storage arrays or hypervisors. But EMC’s entrance into the host-based flash storage market is a powerful demonstration of the wave of disruption caused by flash-based storage and high-performance computing.
The new Nimbus Data E-Class comes just at the right moment, with 500 TB of capacity, a fully redundant “dual active” controller architecture, massive performance (even InfiniBand), and complete feature set (once VAAI is released).
This week, two blog readers let me know what Google Chrome was warning them of malware on my blog. I dived in and discovered that, indeed, a nasty, obfuscated JavaScript attack had made its way into my site. Although I was disappointed by the lack of clarity about how to fix it, I believe I was able to remove it last night.
Although Clear clearly wants buyers to sign up for monthly service, they also have “secret” on-demand 2-hour, daily, and weekly plans. Here’s how to get online cheap!
HP stumbled mightily in 2011, and it had nothing to do with product or people. Even sales remained strong, though the PC business is changing. HP’s mighty stumble was a crisis of confidence due to a chain of shenanigans at the very top. This culminated with the short reign of Léo Apotheker, leaving HP to reassure the market of its strategy.
For a massive IT company, Dell sure doesn’t get the kind of respect given their competitors. Time and again, I’ll hear the sneers about Dell being little more than a “box shifter” who doesn’t “get” real enterprise IT needs. After a series of acquisitions in storage and networking, Dell is trying to stake a claim as a serious competitor to HP, IBM, Oracle, and the like. But why should anyone take Dell seriously, especially in enterprise storage?