I have been struggling for sometime now to understand why cloud computing and cloud storage have suddenly become so popular.  We have previously discussed some of cloud problems (here and here) but we have never touched on why cloud has become so popular. In my view, SaaS or ASPs and MSPs have been around for [...]

Since IBM’s announced their intent to purchase StorWize there has been much discussion on whether primary storage data compression can be made to work.  As far as I know StorWize only offered primary storage compression for file data but there is nothing that prohibits doing something similar for block storage as long as you have some control [...]

Was on a conference call today with Oracle’s marketing discussing their tape business.  Fred Moore (from Horison Information Systems) was on the call and mentioned something which surprised me.  What’s missing in open and distributed systems was some standalone mechanism to stack volumes onto a single tape cartridge. The advantages of tape are significant, namely: [...]

Cloud storage keeps getting more viable and I see storage pricing going down considerably over time.  All of which got me thinking what could be done with a dime per TB per year storage ($0.10/TB/yr).  Now most cloud providers charge 10 cents or more per GB per month so this is at least 12,000 times [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Cloud storage has emerged  as a viable business service in the last couple of years, but what does cloud storage really do for the data center.  Moving data out to the cloud makes for unpredictable access times with potentially unsecured and unprotected data.  So what does the data center gain by using cloud storage? Speed – it [...]