A recent Gizmodo blog post compared a decade of R&D at Sony, Microsoft and Apple.  There were some interesting charts but mostly it showed that R&D as a percent of revenue, fluctuates from year to year and R&D spend has been rising for all the companies (although at different rates).
Overall from a percentage of Revenue basis, [...]

Wouldn’t the National information exchange be better served by deferring the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) and instead implementing some sort of Google-like search of federal, state, and municipal text data records.  Most federal, state and local data resides in sophisticated databases using their information management tools but such tools all seem to support ways [...]

All the news about iPad and iBooks app got me thinking. There’s been much discussion on e-book pricing but no one is looking at what to charge for items other than books.  I look at this as something like what happened to albums when iTunes came out.  Individual songs were now available without having to [...]

Or at least that’s how the WSJ reported it yesterday.
Years back when I was working in corporate strategy we used to have this yearly dance called strategic planning.  Every year we would fan out to all the business units, look at what they were doing and try to figure out what they needed to be [...]

Oracle buys Sun, EMC buys Data Domain, Cisco buys Tandberg, it seems like every month another major billion dollar acquisition occurs.  Part of this is because of the recent economic troubles, which now values many companies at the lowest they have been for many years and thus, making it cheaper to acquire good (and/or failing) [...]

This week, NetApp and Microsoft announced a new agreement that increases the collaboration and integration for both their product technology and sales&marketing activities. Specifically, the new agreement covers better integration of

Microsoft’s virtualized infrastructure interaction with NetApp storage. This currently consists of new PRO Packs for System Center to support NetApp storage and Snap Manager [...]

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). [...]

At HPTechDay this week we had a tour of the EVA test lab, in the south building of HP’s Colorado Springs Facility. I was pretty impressed and I have seen more than my fair share of labs in my day. The fact that they have 1200 servers and 500 EVA arrays was pretty impressive but [...]

Hard drives have been on a capacity tear lately what with perpendicular magnetic recording and tunneling magnetoresistive heads. As evidence of this, Seagate just announced their latest Barracuda XT, a 2TB hard drive with 4 platters with ~500GB/platter at 368Gb/sqin recording density.
Read-head technology limits
Recently, I was at a Rocky Mountain IEEE Magnetics Society seminar [...]

If backup didn’t exist and you had to start over to protect your data how would you do it today?
I think four things are important to protect data in today’s data center:

Any data ever created in the data center or on-the-road needs to be protected,
Data restores must be under end-user control,
Data needs to [...]