Today, I attended a webinar where Pat Gelsinger, President of Information Infrastructure at EMC discussed their concept for a new product based on the Yotta Yotta technology they acquired a few years back.  Yotta Yotta’s product was a distributed, coherent caching appliance that had FC front end ports, an Infiniband appliance internal network and both [...]

Western Digital (WD) announced their first SSD drive for the desktop/laptop market space today.  Their drive offers the typical256, 128, and 64GB capacity points over a SATA interface.  Performance looks ok at 5K random read or write IO/s with sustained transfers at 250 and 140MB/s for read and write respectively.  But what caught my eye [...]

Deduplication is a mechanism to reduce the amount of data stored on disk for backup, archive or even primary storage.  For any storage, data is often duplicated and any system that eliminates storing duplicate data will be more utilize storage more efficiently.
Essentially, deduplication systems identify duplicate data and only store one copy of such data. [...]

Yesterday, Cleversafe announced new Slicestor(r) 2100 and 2200 hardware using 2TB SATA drives. The standard 2100 1U package supports 8TB of raw data and the 2200 new 2U package supports 24TB of data. In addition, a new Accesser(r) 2100 supports 8GB of ECC RAM, and 2 GigE or 10GbE ports for data access.
In [...]

Yesterday, twitterland was buzzing about EMC’s latest enhancement to their Atmos Cloud Storage platform called GeoProtect.  This new capability improves cloud data protection by supporting erasure code data protection rather than just pure object replication.
Erasure coding has been used for over a decade in storage and some of the common algorithms are Reed-Solomon, Cauchy Reed-Soloman, [...]

One astute reader of our performance reports pointed out that some ESRP results could be skewed by the number of drives that are used during a run.  So, we included a database transfers per spindle chart in our latest Exchange Solution Review Program (ESRP) report on 1001 to 5000 mailboxes in our latest newsletter.  The chart [...]

Yesterday in Colorado Springs SNIA held a grand opening for their new Technology Center.  They have moved their tech center about a half mile closer to Pikes Peak.
The new center has less data center floor space than the old one but according to Wayne Adams/EMC and Chairman of SNIA Board, this is a better fit [...]

Intel-Micron Flash Technologies just issued another increase in NAND density. This one’s manages to put 8GB on a single chip with MLC(2) technology in a 167mm square package or roughly a half inch per side.
You may recall that Intel-Micron Flash Technologies (IMFT) is a joint venture between Intel and Micron to develop NAND technology [...]

What would happen if somebody came up with a peer-to-peer cloud (P2P-Cloud) storage or computing service.  I see this as

Operating a little like Napster/Gnutella where many people come together and share out their storage/computing resources.
It could operate in a centralized or decentralized fashion
It  would allow access to data/computing resources anywhere from the internet

Everyone joining the [...]

A head assembly on a Seagate disk drive by Robert Scoble (cc) (from flickr)

I was reading about pythons becoming an invasive species in the Florida Everglades and that brought to mind SSDs.  The current ecological niche in data storage has rotating media as the most prolific predator with tape going on the endangered species list [...]