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 [...]

In a previous post I discussed what it would take to store 1YB of data in 2015 for the National Security Agency (NSA). Due to length, that post did not discuss many other aspects of the 1YB archive such as ingest, index, data protection, etc. Thus, I will attempt to cover each of these in [...]

Well, maybe an Exabyte a day was way too small for 2009. NSA is now reporting that they may be storing yottabytes (YB, 10**24) of data by 2015 somewhere in Utah. Later reports have NSA reducing this down to something closer to 1000 PB or so but YB of storage got me thinking. This points [...]

XAM, a SNIA defined interface standard supporting reference data archives, is starting to become real. EMC and other vendors are starting to supply XAM compliant interfaces.  I could not locate (my Twitter survey for application vendors came back empty) any application vendors supporting XAM APIs but its only a matter of time .  What does XAM mean [...]