Untitled

Flash Forward or Flash Back?

November 8, 2008 By Stephen Leave a Comment

This is part of an ongoing series of longer articles I am posting every Sunday. The tech industry has been buzzing about solid state drives (SSDs) again lately, but many questions remain. Even after many major vendors (Apple, EMC, and Dell to name a few) have introduced NAND flash-based disk into their core products, it is […]

The Future of Home Storage

October 12, 2008 By Stephen 10 Comments

Consumers demand friendly, flexible solutions. They don’t want to fuss with their media, and they don’t want simple shared storage. They want integration with multiple devices and flexibility to access their content on any device.

A Consultant’s View Of The Enterprise Storage Market

September 21, 2008 By Stephen 2 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. I am not the typical enterprise storage user. In fact, I am not an enterprise storage user at all – I am a consultant focused for over a decade […]

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.

Go Get a ProtonMail Account and Protect Your Online Life!

It’s an easy decision: Get a free ProtonMail account and use that as your verification address for important financial and social media accounts. Keep using whatever email account you like for regular communication, but don’t mix security and communication!

Mac OS X Lion Adds CoreStorage, a Volume Manager (Finally!)

August 4, 2011

Mac OS X was majorly deficient in that it lacked a volume manager. This wouldn’t seem like a big deal to the average user, but held back the operating system in so many ways. A volume manager brings storage virtualization to an operating system, allowing storage capacity efficiently to be managed and manipulated. But all this has changed in Mac OS X 10.7 â€œLionâ€ with CoreStorage.

A Fairy Tale of Two Storage Protocols

September 23, 2014

It’s clear how this fairy tale ends. So many companies are using “S3 plus” as their standard interface, and even inside their solutions, that it’s safe to say it’s won the cloud storage API battle. But S3 isn’t a finalized spec – the industry will extend and improve it over the coming years. Soon we’ll have a cloud storage standard based on S3, just like we have a LAN file services standard based on CIFS.

What’s (Still) Wrong With Dropbox For Business

April 17, 2013

I am a heavy (and paying) user of Dropbox, using it both for business and personal storage and synchronization. Although I find the service incredibly useful, Dropbox is far from perfect, especially for business users. So I thought I would take a few moments to talk about what I’d like to see Dropbox improve.

Why You Should Never Again Utter The Word, “CIFS”

February 16, 2012

CIFS is not the network storage protocol used by Microsoft Windows, and many other clients. The protocol used to share files over a LAN by the majority of personal computers is called SMB. I wish everyone in the industry would get that through their heads.

My Core i7 Macintosh SE

May 25, 2017

I recently built the biggest, clunkiest iPad mini case ever, transforming my old Macintosh SE case into an iPad stand. But what to do with that empty case? Why, it’s the perfect size for a custom Mini-ITX PC! Introducing my liquid-cooled Core i7 monster Mac SE!

Donate Your Swag to School Kids In Need

July 28, 2010

Trade shows are a veritable swag-fest, some with great loot and some with junk. I’ve been critical of the booth babe and chotchkie phenomenon, but my friend Kevin Houston has a better suggestion: Donate your (useful) swag like backpacks and pens to school kids in need.

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.

Replacing Google Reader With Feedbin and Reeder

May 5, 2013

I am an avid Google Reader user, so I’m thoroughly annoyed by Google’s decision to kill it as of July 1. But there’s no stopping the tide, so I’ve made the move to Feedbin as a Reader replacement as of today. It’s a slick, snappy web application with a committed developer and, critically, support for Reeder, my favorite offline RSS reading application. Let’s hope this works!