Recent press reports about a bidding war for 3PAR bring into focus the expanding need for enterprise class data storage subsystems.  What exactly is enterprise storage? Defining enterprise storage is frought with problems but I will take a shot.  Enterprise class data storage has: Enhanced reliability, high availability and serviceability – meaning it hardly ever [...]

Somebody needs to create a system that encompasses continuous data protection, deduplication and cloud storage.  Many vendors have various parts of such a solution but none to my knowledge has put it all together. Why CDP, deduplication and cloud storage? We have written about cloud problems in the past (eventual data consistency and what’s holding back [...]

Cloud storage keeps getting more viable and I see storage pricing going down considerably over time.  All of which got me thinking what could be done with a dime per TB per year storage ($0.10/TB/yr).  Now most cloud providers charge 10 cents or more per GB per month so this is at least 12,000 times [...]

Multiple cloud storage gateways either have been announced or are coming out in the next quarter or so. We have talked before about Nasuni’s file cloud storage gateway appliance, but now that more are out one can have a better appreciation of the cloud gateway space. StorSimple Last week I was talking with StorSimple that [...]

We were talking with Ursheet Parikh at StorSimple today about their new cloud gateway product (to be covered in a future post) when at the end of the talk he described some IP they have to handle cloud storage’s “eventual consistency“.  Dumbfounded, I asked him to clarify, having never heard this term before. Apparently, eventual [...]

One problem holding back general purpose cloud storage has been the lack of a “standard” way to get data in and out of the cloud.  Most cloud storage providers supply a REST interface, an object file interface or other proprietary ways to use their facilities.  The problem with this is that they all require some [...]

Yesterday, twitterland was buzzing about EMC’s latest enhancement to their Atmos Cloud Storage platform called GeoProtect.  This new capability improves cloud data protection by supporting erasure code data protection rather than just pure object replication. Erasure coding has been used for over a decade in storage and some of the common algorithms are Reed-Solomon, Cauchy [...]

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 [...]