Category Archives: System effectiveness

NSA’s huge (YBs) new data center to turn on in 2013

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Ray

  Ran across a story in Wired about the new NSA Utah data center today which is scheduled to be operational in September of 2013. This new data center is intended to house copies of all communications intercepted the NSA. … Continue reading →

Posted in Data index, data protection, Data security, Distributed computing, Information economy, Storage density, Strategic Inflection Points, System effectiveness | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Super Talent releases a 4-SSD, RAIDDrive PCIe card

Posted on March 9, 2012 by Ray

Not exactly sure what is happening, but PCIe cards are coming out containing multiple SSD drives. For example, the recently announced Super Talent RAIDDrive UpStream card contains 4 SAS embedded SSDs that can push storage capacity up to almost a TB … Continue reading →

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Storage performance matters, even for smartphones

Posted on February 21, 2012 by Ray

  Read an interesting article from MIT’s Technical Review about a study presented at last weeks Usenix FAST (File and Storage Technology) conference on How Data Storage Cripples Mobile Apps.  It seems storage performance can seriously slow down smartphone functioning, not … Continue reading →

Posted in SSD storage, Storage, Storage performance, System effectiveness | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

SCI’s Latest ESRP (v3) Performance Analysis for Over 5K mailboxes – chart of the month

Posted on February 14, 2012 by Ray

This chart comes from our analysis of Microsoft Exchange Reviewed Solutions Program (ESRP) v3 (Exchange 2010) performance results for the over 5000 mailbox category, a report sent out to SCI Storage Intelligence Newsletter subscribers last month. The total database backup throughput … Continue reading →

Posted in Block Storage, Disk storage, Storage, Storage Backup, Storage performance, System effectiveness | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Magnetic storage using lasers alone

Posted on February 9, 2012 by Ray

Read an article today on AAAS Science Now online magazine (See Hot Idea for a Faster Hard Drive) on using lasers alone to toggle magnetic moments in specially designed ferro-magnetic materials. The disk industry has been experimenting with bit patterned … Continue reading →

Posted in Disk storage, Energy efficiency, Storage, Storage performance, Strategic Inflection Points, System effectiveness | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Why EMC is doing Project Lightening and Thunder

Posted on February 7, 2012 by Ray

Although technically Project Lightening and Thunder represent some interesting offshoots of EMC software, hardware and system prowess,  I wonder why they would decide to go after this particular market space. There are plenty of alternative offerings in the PCIe NAND … Continue reading →

Posted in Data efficiency, Distributed computing, Market dynamics, Scenario planning, SSD storage, Storage performance, Strategic Inflection Points, Strategic planning, System effectiveness, Visionary leadershp | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Latest SPECsfs2008 results, over 1 million NFS ops/sec – chart-of-the-month

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Ray

[We are still catching up on our charts for the past quarter but this one brings us up to date through last month] There’s just something about a million SPECsfs2008(r) NFS throughput operations per second that kind of excites me (weird, … Continue reading →

Posted in Clustered storage, Ethernet, File Storage, SSD storage, Storage drive, Storage performance, System effectiveness | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A day and a half with HP Storage

Posted on January 30, 2012 by Ray

[long post 945 wds] HP held their (annual?) HP Tech Days in Fort Collins, Colorado this last week. We had presentations from a number of HP product managers and got to meet a number of new and old bloggers there. … Continue reading →

Posted in Block Storage, Data reduction, Disk storage, File Storage, Storage architecture, Storage Backup, System effectiveness | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment