Was on a conference call today with Oracle’s marketing discussing their tape business.  Fred Moore (from Horison Information Systems) was on the call and mentioned something which surprised me.  What’s missing in open and distributed systems was some standalone mechanism to stack volumes onto a single tape cartridge. The advantages of tape are significant, namely: [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

There was a time not long ago when the title of this post wouldn’t have included SSD. But, with the history of the last couple of years, SSD has earned its right to be included. A couple of years back I was at a Rocky Mountain Magnetics Seminar (see IEEE magnetics societies) and a disk [...]