Storage Nation

Sorry for falling behind the pace here, but there was a recent EMC product announcement that I found worthy of a deeper discussion. EMC's SourceOne group just announced their new File Intelligence product.  And, as organizations struggle to get their arms around unfettered information growth, we may just have a new and important tool in the arsenal

Today IDC and EMC released their annual study on the size, shape and structure of the "digital universe": the total amount of information we're collectively generating, storing and using. Titled " A Digital Universe Decade: Are You Ready? ", it goes beyond the usual really-big-numbe r type of forecasts to provoke serious discussion on a number of topics.   And if you're a big-picture type of person, you'll want to seriously contemplate some of these findings …

This morning Netapp announced plans to acquire Bycast, Inc., a privately held company in Vancouver BC. I can see wanting an office in Vancouver, so congrats to Netapp on that front.  Also congrats for sticking it in the eyes of storage competitor, HP – and probably their N-Series partner, IBM, – who have been acting as the OEM sales channel for Bycast.

Unlike many of my fellow bloggers, it seems, I have been engaging with consumers — nearly a hundred in the last two weeks — and gathering their insights about this whole tempest in a teapot called on-array tiering.  That’s code for 1) establishing a tier of Flash SSD in a conventional disk array, 2) adding

In my previous post , I attempted to present some of the basic impacts of FAST — fully automated storage tiering, and how they were reflective of a Big Theme I want call the continuing virtualization of storage. This theme plays out in two primary ways — one of which is storage's continuing alignment with fully virtualized servers and networks.  And the other is how — once we fully abstract logical from physical — many more things are possible in the storage domain than we might previously have assumed. This second post digs in deep on the second idea — what new things are now possible once we fully embrace "virtualized storage"?  And one of those "new things" is an entirely new take on storage tiering.

Patternicity – defined by Michael Shermer – a writer for Scientific American – is the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise.  When I read this article on Pattnernicity I immediately related it to the challenges we face with information access.  Patternicity deals with false positives and we have a compartive with search tools – too many responses that may or may not be what we are looking for.  Human Patternicity is meant to err on the side of caution because as Shermer points out – “the cost of believing that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is just the wind is relatively low compared with the opposite. Thus, there would have been a beneficial selection for believing that most patterns are real.” Digital Patternicity is also meant to err on the side of caution because the cost of believing that the keyword matches your intentions is relatively low compared with returning a false negative.  Therefore returning a false positive is better than returning a false negative.  The problem in both Human and Digital Patternicity is that the algorithms are limited and have stopped evolving because they don’t need to improve.   Human beings are very successful and don’t require more sophisticated methods for returning fewer false positives.  Likewise, search companies like Google are very successful and have built a huge business in spite of the number of false positives they return.  However, increasingly within the world of business – where information equates to revenue, competitive advantage and market growth – there is a big price to pay with false positives and a shift in the evolution of Digital Patternicity must occur.  There will always be a place for acceptable false positives in the mass market – but when you get to specialization, when the stakes become too high, when survival is at risk – then evolution aggressively adapts. Original post blogged on Contemplating IT .

Alright we all know that we have a ton of data and its growing and growing.

I’ve just joined this site and thought I’d share a link to some articles that might be of interest here. I keep a couple of blogs, and here are some selected entries: 1. IT Benchmarking- How Do You Know How You’re Doing