Storage Nation

ESJ.com is running another of our C-4 Project video segments, this time with CEO and Chairman of FalconStor, ReiJane Huai.  Check it out. Mr. Huai reflected on his role in bringing tape backup to the distributed world, then offered commentary on several topics of interest including the formation of mini-me mainframes (“if you are going to

The tickler I received in email this AM filled me with interest in what Mr. Foskett, lately of Nirvanix, was going to write about this question in his multi-part blog.  My fingers tingled with expectation as I keyed in the URL for his postings

We learned as kids.  Here is an article I wrote about it in Mainframe Executive, which has been cross-posted to MainframeZone. I am also pleased that an article by moi — the REAL storage blogger wannabe — has just hit the wire at ESJ.com.  It covers file proliferation and the lame efforts of the industry to scale

For tomorrow’s webcast at Redmond Magazine: Hope some  of you can join us.  Link.

Given all the things that I'm engaged with these days, it was rewarding to see our friends at Cisco make a good set of announcements around enabling service providers with IaaS — Infrastructure as a Service.  And I'm a bit embarrassed that I didn't catch this earlier … But — at the same time — as I digest this announcement, I'm torn. There's a lot to like here.  But it also reinforces my notion that we — as an industry — have just started to travel down a rather long road …

The headlines reads: " VMware To Acquire Certain IT Management Products and Software Expertise from EMC Corporation ". People will perceive this story one of two ways, depending on their perspective. The first (and most common) perspective will be "so what?" The second (and less frequent) perspective will be "this might be a big deal …" And I'd like a chance to share why I think this is more of the latter, and less of the former.

NetApp’s Georgens said aloud the other day that automated tiering of storage is not the hot button that everyone is making it out to be.  As reported by Tech Target, Georgens maintains automated tiering is definitely overrated, although it’s being hailed as another “must-have” offering within a year or so due to the rise of Flash

I was recently asked to look into Cloud Storage options for our organization and if it might fit in the future for some archives etc.   I checked out what was being offered by all the big names, AmazonS3, Google, I was eventualy led to  ParaScale and Zetta as what seemed to offer the best capabilites to an enterprise user.   The “storage” costs were as hyped, very cheap.  They run $0.25/GB and lower.  Compared to several dollars per Gig we pay Read More…

I read with empathy recent posts on Wikibon regarding the general perception that storage management tools could be a whole lot better. One excellent post spoke of managing storage performance .  Another speaks to large warehousing workloads meandering through the fabric, and the havoc that caused.  Good reading. It'd be easy enough to say, " yes, darn it, we need better tools! ".  And plenty of storage admins would agree with me wholeheartedly. My argument, however, is that tools in isolation can only get you so far.  At some point, the model needs to change.  And that's a more difficult proposition

I’ve been pondering Cisco and their Unified Computing System (UCS) and decided to finally blog on it. I participated in a InfoSmack podcast that included a brief discussion on UCS and recently talked to Cisco’s Jesse Freund – who manages analysts relations for the Cisco UCS.