My 2009 IT Industry Predictions
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Computer history, Enterprise storage, Everything, Personal, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage on 24. Dec, 2009 | View Comments
Predictions are perilous: Get it right and you look like a mere trend-watcher; get it wrong and you look like a fool. So I’m doing something different this year: I’m going to make predictions for 2009 now that it’s over, and reflect on just how smart I am (not) to have made them.
Snow Leopard Is Stingy With The Storage Love
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Enterprise storage on 09. Jun, 2009 | View Comments
Apple wowed its fans and impressed its critics with a successful worldwide developer conference keynote yesterday. Along with much obvious focus on iPhone OS 3.0 and the new speedier iPhone 3GS, the company turned the spotlight on new Mac hardware and the next version of OS X, Snow Leopard. This is a lower-profile OS release [...]
Will Snow Leopard Finally Bring iSCSI To The Mac?
Posted by Stephen in Apple on 18. Mar, 2009 | View Comments
ZFS wasn’t the only AWOL storage technology in Apple’s OS X 10.5 – early builds of Leopard included a built-in iSCSI initiator. When the operating system was finally released in October of 2007, both ZFS and iSCSI were quietly dropped, making room for 300 other features Apple felt were more prime-time-ready.
With the next major OS [...]
SSD: So Close and Yet So Far
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 15. Oct, 2008 | View Comments
Solid state (NAND flash) storage is all the rage right now, but there are many lingering questions regarding its true performance, reliability, and cost. But no question is more important in determining its ultimate usefulness than that of location: Where should flash storage be placed to maximize return on investment?
Storage companies have argued that flash [...]
Compellent Does Enterprise SSD Right
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 13. Oct, 2008 | View Comments
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 [...]
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.
greenBytes Embraces and Extends ZFS
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 15. Sep, 2008 | View Comments
I’ve long hollered that ZFS is a real storage revolution in the making, but recognized that it still had a way to go before replacing UFS, HFS+, and most volume managers. Well, a little Rhode Island company called greenBytes comes out of stealth today to announce that they’re doing just that – taking the solid [...]
Turning the Page on RAID
Posted by Stephen in Computer history, Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 14. 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.
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 abandoning [...]
ZFS: Super File System!
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Enterprise storage, Terabyte home on 27. Feb, 2008 | View Comments
ZFS really piques my interest, so I just had to include it in my TechTarget storage virtualization seminar series.
Here’s a quick primer for those of you who aren’t familiar with it, and thus are wondering why anyone would get stoked over a filesystem!
ZFS (originally “zettabyte file system” but now just ZFS) takes the essential technolgy [...]
