Data Gravity

Today’s Storage: Same As It Ever Was

July 7, 2015 by Stephen 1 Comment

Data storage has always been one of the most conservative areas of enterprise IT. There is little tolerance for risk, and rightly so: Storage is persistent, long-lived, and must be absolutely reliable. Lose a server or network switch and there is the potential for service disruption or transient data corruption, but lose a storage array (and thus the data on it) and there can be serious business consequences.

Virtualized and Distributed Storage: This Time For Sure!

September 2, 2014 by Stephen 3 Comments

We were never able to achieve storage virtualization in mainstream enterprise IT because we lacked the ability to identify and move data non-disruptively. This has been solved by caching and distributed storage solutions, and it’s only a matter of time before the legacy need for centralized storage falls away.

The Fat Middle: Today’s Enterprise Storage Array

August 31, 2014 by Stephen 7 Comments

Ask any project manager if it’s possible to deliver something that is fast, good, and cheap, and they’ll laugh. The phenomenon known as the Iron Triangle limits just about everything in the world from meeting all three conflicting requirements. Yet, for the last two decades, enterprise storage array vendors have been trying to deliver just this. How’s that working out?

GPS Time Rollover Failures Keep Happening (But They’re Almost Done)

This is week “1111111111” in the GPS system. Tomorrow morning it will roll over to week “0000000000”. How well will various systems handle this change? Not well, judging by what we’ve seen so far!

Ranting and Raving About the 2018 iPad Pro

I remain enthusiastic about the iPad Pro, despite getting a scratched screen and my concerns about durability. It’s a worthy successor to the original and offers enough improvements that I’d recommend the upgrade for just about anyone who uses their iPad for serious work. It’s still not yet a laptop replacement, but this is due more to a lack of desktop-class software for iOS than anything in Apple’s control.

Why Buy a NEX-7? Why Sony NEX At All?

October 17, 2011

Your tweets about your NEX have intrigued me a bit…I get tired of lugging my Nikon D90 around with my kids, yet I find the quality of most point-and-shoot cameras terrible…so the NEX seems like an interesting compromise.

Microsoft’s Big Chance to Change

August 23, 2013

It takes a truly-remarkable leader to be willing to kill his old golden geese to make room for a new one; so far, only Apple and Amazon seem willing to forgo continuity in the name of profitable destruction. But new corporate leadership at Microsoft might un-stick the company and awaken the once-innovative Redmond powerhouse. The retirement of Steve Ballmer is welcome news.

What More Could Alan Turing Have Accomplished?

October 7, 2012

Many of you have probably heard the name of Alan Turing, but most of those probably don’t appreciate the extent of his contributions. To say that he invented the modern world is an overstatement, but he did dream up the computers we see around us today, and helped win World War II in the process. But the story of Alan Turing is as much about exclusion and defeat as it is of genius.

Scaling Storage In Conventional Arrays

November 19, 2013

It is amazing that something as simple-sounding as making an array get bigger can be so complex, yet scaling storage is notoriously difficult. Our storage protocols just werenâ€™t designed with scaling in mind, and they lack the flexibility needed to dynamically address multiple nodes. So my hat is off to these companies and others who have come up with clever ways to maintain compatibility while scaling out beyond the bounds of a single storage array.

SMB 3 is Going to be Huge, in both Scope and Impact

May 6, 2012

Microsoft is about to release the third major revision to their ubiquitous network storage protocol, SMB. Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V 3 will really highlight this technology, and I predict it will transform the way people think about networked storage for Windows systems. But SMB 3 is big in another way, too: there are tons of new features, and not all will be implemented by everyone.

MacBook Users: Encrypt Your Drive with OS X FileVault! It’s Easy and Free!

December 20, 2012

Once you encrypt your MacBook’s drive with FileVault 2, you’ll never even know it’s there. But if you ever lose your machine, you can rest easy knowing that your data is safe. Considering how well this solution performs and that it is included free of charge, there is no reason not to use it!

ZFS Is the Best Filesystem (For Now…)

July 10, 2017

ZFS should have been great, but I kind of hate it: ZFS seems to be trapped in the past, before it was sidelined it as the cool storage project of choice; it’s inflexible; it lacks modern flash integration; and it’s not directly supported by most operating systems. But I put all my valuable data on ZFS because it simply offers the best level of data protection in a small office/home office (SOHO) environment. Here’s why.

The Ideal pfSense Platform: Netgate RCC-VE 2440

September 21, 2015

After some frustration with stability and latency connecting my virtual pfSense router to my cable and DSL modems, I decided to switch to a physical box. I selected the Netgate RCC-VE 2440 as my hardware platform, since it’s the same box that pfSense themselves use as their OEM bundle. It also checks all the boxes with a dual-core Atom CPU, four Gigabit Ethernet ports, and low-power fanless design. Here’s my first impression and installation notes!