Storage Nation

I finally managed to attend a London CloudCamp last Thursday, which conveniently co-incided with a #storagebeers evening.  For two hours of listening to the collective wisdom of the presenters and the “unpanel” we were offered free beer and food

I was pleasantly surprised to see this article where some hands-on reviewers were favorably impressed with RSA's extended DLP (data loss prevention) capabilities. Yes, it's a pretty cool set of capabilities.  And we could do a feature-by-feature comparison of our stuff vs. their stuff and probably come out ahead. But it becomes an unfair comparison where we take these capabilities, and put them in the broader context of EMC's emergent stack

I was pleasantly surprised by the vigorous debate kicked off by one of my recent posts " The Future Doesn't Have A File System ".  Although most of the vigorous rhetoric came from an individual with a clear vested interest (Alex McDonald who is the competitive blogger over at NetApp), he did bring forth some themes that I'm sure are more widely shared.  And, just as vigorously, Paul Carpentier of FilePool (Centera) fame argued the other side of the equation. I'd like to use this post to step back a bit and lay a bit of groundwork as to why this is such an interesting topic to so many of us looking at architecture. Consider The Object Perhaps one of the simplest concepts in computer science, it usually boils down couple of standard components. – an arbitrary amount of bits (data, code, whatever) – a unique identifier – an aribrary amount of metadata to describe it to different parties – and some sort of access method to invoke or use it That's about it.  It's about as clean an abstraction as you'll find.  Application developers are very comfortable with objects (usually procedural code), and assembling application from collections of various objects.