Storage Nation

Curtis Chan called me Friday to nudge me to write something about ProStor, the guys who have made arrays out of removable laptop hard disks. They had sent me an external USB-connected unit and one hardened disk cartridge (about the size of a pack of cigarettes) just before Christmas and I promised to put it

One of the thoughts being promoted by one of our competitors last week was "snaps are all you need for data protection".  Some folks at EMC asked me to comment, so I thought I'd share here. Let me know what you think? Yes, But … Here's where I would agree with the thought

"Nothing good is easy ; nothing easy is good". I don't remember who said that originally, but that thought has always stuck in my head. And as I work with more organizations who have started down a private cloud road (or something very similar), I'm beginning to see repeatable patterns emerge

So many things are tantalizing mixes of unknown opportunity and unknown risks.  And, certainly, for many enterprise IT organizations, the topic of "cloud" certainly fits this description. You can't hide your head in the sand.  You can't plunge headfirst into it and ignore the obvious risks. In between these two extremes is the notion of governance: a policy-making function that attempts to assess opportunities and risks in a dynamically changing environment.  Several years ago when I was doing the corporate social media strategy thing, I found that a good governance model can accelerate change.

megan fox 2010 2 girls 1 cup 2010 Just as George McFly became a real man when he embraced his density, so shall we all. This week, two big announcements were made about technologies that will/promise to dramatically increase the storage capacities of magnetic media

Yes, I'm still talking with customers about private cloud models, day in and day out.  The funny part is that now they're asking me, rather than me bringing it up.  That's progress, I guess. Just to refresh your memory, in my simple world clouds have three major attributes: * they're built differently — dynamic pools of virtualized resources * they're operated differently — zero-touch or low-touch aggregated models * they're consumed differently — they're convenient to consume I seemed to have spent the first part of 2009 discussing the technology.  Fortunately, many people now generally accept that fully virtualized environments can be better than their physical counterparts in many situations. And, as I think about it, I spent a great deal of time during the second part of the year on operational models: the need for self-service, the importance of flexibility, how traditional roles and responsibilities change, and attacking the people / process / politics part of the problem

Was chatting with a customer about the impact of a recent EMC announcement where the CLARiiON now has a 4:1 advantage in capacity density: twice as much physical capacity (due to 2TB drives) as well as also doing so in half the space (due to double density packaging). Rather than incessantly brag about the achievement ( sooner or later, other vendors will eventually figure out how to do this ), I thought it was indicative of how our thinking around storage is starting to change — and fast. The Basics Let's start with contemplating storage arrays and drives just a few years back — say, 2007. You wanted decent capacity, but decent performance as well.  Sure, there were exotic faster drives, and large "data tub" drives based on ATA, but it took heavy lifting to get the right data on the right storage at the right time

Way back when, I thought it useful to do two courses of study.  I wanted that CS (computer science) degree, but the whole topic, while fascinating, seemed so self-contained. At the time, I thought adding coursework in economics was the right thing to do.  Even way back in the late 1970s (yes, I'm that old), I could see the two interweaving in very interesting ways.

Just was getting some thoughts out about using GPGPUs (nVidia’s Tesla and Fermi products, ATI’s FireStream ) for handling some of the menial cloud-based operations ( metadata calc, metadata location servicing, offload, etc.) that we have as part of any type of cloud file system . So, what are your thoughts?  The capacity to further collapse x86 commodity platforms by utilizing the extreme amount of processing capability present within these GPGPUs and coupling optimized OpenCL or CUDA routines into the standard CFS processing stack. Just something to think about.

As we enter 2010, I thought it important to reach out to you directly. I know, you get bombarded by IT vendors all the time, so I understand your natural skepticism.