Waves of innovation and waves of companies, crash on the storage market, but the same incumbent leaders and product lines survive for decades. Are things changing? It’s hard to see sometimes, but real progress has been made.
RAID
Today’s Storage: Same As It Ever Was
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.
Why Big Disk Drives Require Data Integrity Checking
Hard disk drives keep getting bigger, meaning capacity just keeps getting cheaper. But storage capacity is like money: The more you have, the more you use. And this growth in capacity means that data is at risk from a very old nemesis: Unrecoverable Read Errors (URE).
Truth in Storage: The Next Generation – Announcing My 2014 Seminar Series
This year for my Truth in IT seminars, I’m shifting away from virtualization to focus on enterprise storage once again. But this won’t be any ordinary “storage 101†seminar. Rather than trying to talk about every element, I’m focused on what’s new!
The I/O Blender Part 2: What Does Virtualization Do?
Virtualization is a disruptive technology in every sense of the word. By abstracting and simplifying physical resources, virtualization enables dynamic utilization. But this “translation†from physical to virtual disrupts the assumptions that enable performance and flexibility of physical devices such as storage arrays.