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 [...]

A recent article from MIT’s Technology Review discussed cloud security (“Security in the Ether”). Most of the article was on how many cloud servers are vulnerable to a particular hack that can uncover private data in server memory/cache. But a good portion of the article was on how to secure data in the cloud and [...]

We have posted previously about the need for backup in cloud storage. So today I would like to start a discussion on securing “data-at-rest” within the cloud. Depositing data into the cloud seems a little like a chinese laundry to me – you deposit data in the cloud and receive a ticket or token used [...]

I saw a recent IEEE Spectrum article on engineering’s grand challenges for the next century and thought something similar should be done for data storage. So this is a start: Replace magnetic storage – most predictions show that magnetic disk storage has another 25 years and magnetic tape another decade after that before they run [...]

In my past life, I worked for a dominant tape vendor. Over the years, we had heard a number of times that tape was dead. But it never happened. BTW, it’s also not happening today. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was at SNW and vendor friend of mine asked if I knew anyone [...]

My recent post on an exabyte-a-day generated a comment that got me thinking. What we need in the world today is a universal deduped archive. Such an archive would be a repository for all information generated by the world, nation, state, etc. and would automatically deduplicate the data and back it up. Such an archive [...]

The above chart shows the top 12 LRT(tm) (least response time) results for Storage Performance Council’s SPC-1 benchmark. The vertical axis is the LRT in milliseconds (msec.) for the top benchmark runs. As can be seen the two subsystems from TMS (RamSan400 and RamSan320) dominate this category with LRTs significantly less than 2.5msec. IBM DS8300 [...]

Steve Duplessie’s recent post on how the lack of scarcity will be a gamechanger got me thinking. Free is good but the simplicity of the user/administrative interface is worth paying for. And it’s that simplicity that pays off for me. Ease of use I agree wholeheartedly with Steve about what and where people should spend [...]