Category Archives: storage economics

Why Open-FCoE is important

Posted on January 28, 2011 by Ray

I don’t know much about O/S drivers but I do know lots about storage interfaces. One thing that’s apparent from yesterday’s announcement from Intel is that Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) has taken another big leap forward. Chad Sakac’s chart … Continue reading →

Posted in Block Storage, Ethernet, FC, FCoE, Networking, Server virtualization, Storage, storage economics, Storage performance, Strategic Inflection Points | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Whatever happened to holographic storage?

Posted on January 14, 2011 by Ray

Although InPhase Technologies and a few other startups had taken a shot at holographic storage over time, there has not been any recent innovation here that I can see. Ecosystems matter The real problem (which InPhase was trying to address) … Continue reading →

Posted in Business economics, Holographic storage, Market dynamics, Optical storage, Storage, storage economics, Strategy, System effectiveness, Systems | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

SOHO backup options

Posted on January 5, 2011 by Ray

I must admit, even though I have disparaged DVD archive life (see CDs and DVDs longevity questioned) I still backup my work desktops/family computers to DVD and DVDdl disks.  It’s cheap (on sale 100 DVDs cost about $30 and DVDdl … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, data protection, storage economics, Storage longevity, System effectiveness, Tape storage | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

What eMLC and eSLC do for SSD longevity

Posted on October 18, 2010 by Ray

I talked last week with some folks from Nimbus Data who were discussing their new storage subsystem.  Apparently it uses eMLC (enterprise Multi-Level Cell) NAND SSDs for its storage and has no SLC (Single Level Cell) NAND at all. Nimbus … Continue reading →

Posted in storage economics, Storage longevity, System quality | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Cirtas surfaces

Posted on September 21, 2010 by Ray

Yesterday, Cirtas came out of stealth mode and into the lime-light with their new Bluejet cloud storage controller hardware system.  Cirtas joins a number of other products offering cloud storage to the enterprise by supplying a more standard interface which … Continue reading →

Posted in Block Storage, storage economics, Storage performance | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

Why cloud, why now?

Posted on August 10, 2010 by Ray

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Business economics, Cloud services, Market dynamics, storage economics, Strategy, Systems | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Primary storage compression can work

Posted on August 3, 2010 by Ray

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Block Storage, storage economics, Storage Features | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

What’s wrong with tape?

Posted on July 30, 2010 by Ray

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Storage, storage economics, Tape storage | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment