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. [...]

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 [...]

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  often [...]

All data operates under a set of laws but unstructured data suffers from these tendencies more than most of all. Although, information technology has helped us to create and manage data easier, it hasn’t done much to minimize the problems these laws produce.
As such, I introduce here my 5 laws of unstructured [...]

Today Seagate announced their new SSD offering, named the Pulsar SSD.  It uses SLC NAND technology and comes in a 2.5″ form factor at 50, 100 or 200GB capacity.  The fact that it uses a 3GB/s SATA interface seems to indicate that Seagate is going after the server market rather than the highend storage market [...]

When I first heard about cloud storage I wondered just what exactly it was trying to solve. There are many storage problems within the IT shop nowadays days, cloud storage can solve a few of them but introduces more and leaves a few unsolved.
Storage problems solved by cloud storage

Dynamic capacity – storage capacity is [...]

Both EMC and Spectra Logic celebrated their 30 years in business this month and it got me to thinking. Both companies started the same time but one is a ~$14B revenue (‘09 projected) behemoth and the other a relatively successful, but relatively mid-size storage company (Spectra Logic is private and does not report revenues). [...]