Storage Nation

One of the earliest things I’ve learned as I jumped into system management was the importance of standards; not only standards for equipment but also standards surrounding naming conventions.

In this section we will discuss the need for proper labeling of cables, servers, and storage hardware. I have been in many data-centers over time, and have two extremes of this process. From no labeling to everything being labeled, what I will try to assist you with in this section is the ability to find a happy medium between the two.  Cable Labeling – The importance here is to ensure that each end of the cable is labeled, as well as any junction box interconnects that may exiRead More..

You will all have already seen IBM’s announcement last week on it’s Long Term File System (LTFS).

One thing that always irritated me, as a end-user is none of the vendors every really had any real answers around cable and label management, at least not something you didn’t have to pay for a professional services engagement on.

The woes of a storage monkey trying to decide which vendor technology solution is the most appropriate seem to go on for ever.

SNW Spring | April 12-15, 2010 | Rosen Shingle Creek | Orlando, FL Qualified IT end-user members of Storage Monkey may attend SNW Spring for free!  To apply for this special registration offer (a $1690 value), you must have IT responsibilities in an end-user organization and be a member of the Storage Monkey community ( http://www.storagemonkeys.com/ ).  Register now at:  http://www.snwusa.com/monkey  SNW is the world’s largest event on stoRead More…

I saw a tweet this morning from Stephen Foskett (@sfoskett): ”Looks like 3PAR, BlueArc, Compellent, Dell, EMC, HDS, HP, IBM, NetApp, and Pillar all claim to offer thin provisioning of some sort” . My answer on twitter was: ”it’s time to take a better look to implementations!” All vendors are working to offer new features on their storages and this is a never ending race that briRead More…

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…

Good Day….

If you haven’t yet tuned into the weekly podcast known as Infosmack on community site Storage Monkeys, you’re missing out. Every Monday, hosts Greg Knieriemen and Marc Farley bring on guests to dish about the latest storage industry news–and they do so in a very entertaining and informative way.