News today is that powerhouse IT publisher, The Register, has snapped up storage industry reporting up and comer, Blocks and Files. Included in the deal is amusing editor/writer Chris Mellor and the back catalog of editorials. Left to rot are the sponsored (?) advertorials and regurgitated press releases. B&F will become a new storage-focused Register […]
Archives for 2008
An Ode to Visual Voicemail
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 have long felt that voicemail was archaic. Like fax machines, voice mail systems seem stuck in an earlier era, with arcane controls and so little feedback that the user has […]
Microsoft Working to Improve Windows 7 Boot Times
Confirming my observation of longish Windows boot times, Microsoft engineer Michael Fortin today blogged about the booting improvements scheduled for Windows 7. He rightly points out that there are really three different “boot times” to consider: Boot Resume from sleep Resume from hibernate Note that the Microsoft definition of “boot (1)” only gets us through […]
Grapples and Tangelos: Why it’s Impossible to Compare Fairly
I get the same questions all the time: Should I buy X or Y? Is Z better than Q? But as much as it sounds like a cop-out, I always answer, “well, this sounds like a cop-out, but that depends on what you’re doing with it…” Now EMC’s Chuck Hollis has (bravely) stuck his neck […]
Xen 3.3 Update Brings Paravirtualized SCSI
One of the new features in Xen 3.3, released this week, caught my eye: Paravirtualized SCSI (PVSCSI), which allows a guest OS to directly interact with a SCSI (or Fibre Channel) HBA. This should allow more specialized applications to be virtualized in Xen environments that use SCSI or FC storage without requiring the addition of […]
