Storage Nation

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 received a link to an article where we can find an interview with Symantec’s Mathew Lodge and their view on data deduplication. I couldn’t help but noticing the following quote:According to a recent survey by Applied Research, more than half of all organizations expect to spend more on storage in 2009 than they did in 2008. But at the same time, the latest Symantec State of the Data Center Report indicates that storage utilisation hovers at just 50%.Now, that got me thinking on a couple of thiRead More..

This bugs me a bit now. I never really thought about it much until someone pointed out the difference. Now I notice that people casually use ‘disaster recovery’ as a broad protection term for every type of IT mishap. This is an example of a mis-use of the term from a large, well respected company’s web site (2 days ago) ……

One of my Twitter mates (@ayewill) posted an interesting blog about Microsoft and the State of Washington getting into a scuffle over taxes. The main point of contention is a new 7.9% tax levied on Microsoft for their Azure (MS’s Cloud Computing) data center. Unable to come to a mutual agreement, Microsoft decided to move their data center… Immediately, I had about half a dozen questions in my mind..

Here are the results from the vote for the Top 10 Vendor Storage Blogs:   Mike Workman (Pillar) – http://blog.pillardata.com/  1583 ( 13.88%) Dave Hitz (NetApp) http://blogs.netapp.com/dave/  1225 ( 10.74%) HP StorageWorks Blog – http://www.hp.com/storage/blog  950 ( 8.33%) Val Bercovici (NetApp) – http://blogs.netapp.com/exposed/  855 ( 7.5%) Alex McDonald (NetApp) – http://blogs.netapp.com/shadeofblue/  725 ( 6.36%Read More…

In my ongoing crusade against bogus analysts, I think I’ve found one that trumps them all: George Crump.  Most people in the storage industry have heard of George Crump and, wisely, most people simply ignore him. In our "play along to get along" universe, no one really likes to challenge the credentials of anyone else lest they be the target of the same scrutiny. I don’t care about etiquette and if you’ve followed this blog at all, no one is above scrutiny.  Read More..

First, let me put my biases right on the table.