All Posts Tagged With: "Storage"
Cloudera struck lucky in getting a $5M A-round away just before the markets shut down in response to the collapse of the global financial system. Backed by Accel Partners and more recently Greylock Partners they are making a bet that Hadoop with a smart scale out approach to managing large amounts of data is a [...]
Continue ReadingRecently I spoke to David Emery a friend and colleague from my time at Coopers & Lybrand. He is now working on a major social media initiative for a global mobile telco. I was interested in David’s perspective as he has been working on a set of solutions to process log files at enormous scale. [...]
Continue ReadingData Centre design is an evolutionary process and we can see the first signs of significant change in the latest sites. Co-generation, liquid cooling, cloud computing, high density are all likely to feature in the 2020 Data Centre. How are you placed with your existing Data Centre investments to take advantage of these changes? Will [...]
Continue ReadingMost people who read this won’t have a clue what a Hollerith punched card is. I only just caught the end of the era at University where I learned to program in FORTRAN coding one punched card at a time. Once the stack of cards was complete, I delivered it to the computer operator for [...]
Continue ReadingIf you have been following the storage business for a while, you will have noticed a few changes:
Introduction of Flash Memory components as Solid State Disks
Serial ATA (SATA) disks becoming popular and growing in capacity (2TB soon)
There are lots of other disk technologies around like Fibre Channel and SAS but SSD and SATA are getting [...]
Continue ReadingBoth Seagate and Western Digital announced Q2 results last week perhaps signalling a return of confidence in the disk drive channel. Component manufacturers in the enterprise IT channel are an interesting bellwether of market confidence as orders need to be placed in advance of shipments of finished goods. There is a significant delay in revenue [...]
Continue ReadingEveryone I speak to in the industry agrees that IT components are getting harder to integrate. It’s not a new issue, this complexity, it’s just got harder and harder over the years to make sense of how everything should plug together. So when I speak to friends in the industry who are faced with delivering [...]
Continue ReadingHere is one of the first real photographs of an EMC / Cisco Vblock.
Continue ReadingApplication Developer: My new application needs to store some objects. Can I have a bit of storage please?
Storage Administrator: So do you want NAS or Block storage?
Application Developer: Is there a Java object library for that stuff, what did you call it nasty blocks?
Storage Administrator: (mumbles) stupid code monkey… Who knows – thats your job [...]
The Hot Aisle ran a poll recently asking you all about Cloud Storage and we got some very interesting results from over 5600 respondents:
We asked the question – Does Cloud Storage have to be delivered as an Object Store?
Here are my observations:-
A surprising number of folks don’t know what Cloud Storage is!
Most people thing that [...]
I visited IP Expo at Earls Court today and had a look around and concluded that everyone is on message about the cloud. If vendor push gets a technology going then cloud is moving at the speed of light.
I mostly went to interview VirtualGeek, Chad Sakac VP, VMware Technology Alliance at EMC who was hot [...]
This week we have had two announcements about extreme (and I mean extreme) high performance storage arrays that follow the same basic approach. What they have in common is that they both use solid state (Flash) memory with a twist.
Oracle announces the Exadata Storage Server v2 their new Sun built OLTP Database machine and makes [...]
The Exadata uses Flash, lots of Flash and it uses Infiniband, not Fiber Channel, Ethernet or FCoE. Exadata uses PCI Flash memory modules not Solid State Disks. Actually it is not a general purpose storage controller and it doesn’t support non Oracle Database workload. It is designed from the outset to host Oracle Databases and [...]
Continue ReadingI just picked up a neat blog post by Martin Glassborow (@storagebod) discussing a double disk failure in a RAID 5 array which (apparently) caused lost data.
RAID is Redundant Array of Independent Disks and the number refers to the type of protection offered. RAID 5 means that there is an extra disks in the group [...]
For some time I have been saying that a real IT shop would be ill advised to attempt consolidation to a single hypervisior. Why?
My sense is that we have two types of workload, the mission critical, drives the business applications and services that cannot fail. These are the Fedex Logistics platform, the eBay portal, the [...]
My recent article on IBM’s XIV product has created a real torrent of calls and mails from competitors, analysts and others in the industry saying I am completely barking mad and that IBM storage (particularly XIV) is a joke.
It is true that IBM have been really bad at communicating their storage message and even worse [...]
As a further takeaway Anix stated that the configuration work of the XIV during the Proof of Concept was very simple, taking minutes to complete – “far quicker then using the existing EMC and IBM infrastructure ”
Today I spoke to a UK based Infrastructure Consultancy Anix (now part of ACS) about an XIV storage solution [...]
Over the last few months I have been thinking about data centers, how we power and cool them and what we put in them. I’ve been looking at what the very largest consumers of IT infrastructure do with their data centers compared to industry norms. The first take away is that almost none of them conform [...]
Continue ReadingCloud computing changes things, it makes administration and management of an X.86 environment easier and more automated. But until now the real goodies of VMWare’s product set, VMotion and VSphere have been limited to the small number of organizations that can afford to install a SAN. You see shared storage is a necessity in VMWare’s [...]
Continue ReadingThere are some pretty big movements happening right now resulting from the Cisco announcement of California – Unified Computing System (UCS) – their networked server offering. Politically this has partially alienated HP and IBM, who have big Server businesses and also buy a ton of Cisco equipment. So we are seeing a polarization of network [...]
Continue ReadingI always enjoy reading posts on my friend and colleague Steve Duplessie’s blog. Todays is exceptional. Steve has the rarest of talents, the ability to cut through the noise and get straight to the real issue. That’s why Enterprise Strategy Group is the best analyst firm in the world and has a client list that [...]
Continue ReadingI have just spent the last few days at EMC World in Orlando (Florida) getting wet hearing the cloud and virtualization story unfold. We saw lots of clouds in the skies over Orlando as we endured a pretty constant downpour from Sunday when I arrived.
There is no doubt that virtualization is warming up with lots [...]
The storage wars are hotting up with EMC the clear leader in block oriented product and with a huge portfolio of software that places them as the seventh biggest software company on the planet. NetApp hold onto the leadership position in the Network Attached Storage (NAS) market with a technically advanced set of products. Why [...]
Continue ReadingThis week I am at EMC World in Orlando picking up a sense that cloud is the message, private cloud, public cloud, storage cloud, compute cloud. It’s a strong message that resonates with the CIO and the business as it holds the promise of computing on demand and maybe even the utility computing that we [...]
Continue ReadingLong time disk manufacturer Fujitsu have pulled out of the disk business, selling their design and manufacturing facilities to Toshiba.
Toshiba and Fujitsu have concluded a definitive agreement on the transfer of Fujitsu’s hard disk drive (HDD) business to Toshiba. Under the terms of the acquisition agreement, Toshiba will acquire Fujitsu’s HDD design, development, manufacturing, sales [...]
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