|
OEM Data Optimization Solutions |
No, not grid storage or cloud computing. I'm off to the wilds of Black Rock City, NV, and this year's Burning Man festival, so you won't be hearing from me for another two weeks after the recent flurry of activity. If I see anything particularly storage related, however, I will try to make a post! In the meantime, be sure to check out the webinar Mike is doing next week; it promises to be interesting. Also, in addition to The Trouble With RA...
We're starting to get deep into the election season, so the negative ads are coming fast and furious. Shadowy pictures and a scary voice saying things like "John Smith says that he supports healthy meals for school children, but could it really be because he's fattening them up to be sold as meat to foreign terrorists? A child-eating terrorist supporter? Is that really the sort of person you want as your state representative?" The sort of ma...
I've written a lot here about how cost reduction is a primary driver for implementing an enterprise archive system, but I haven't yet explained exactly how implementing a product like Permabit Enterprise Archive will directly (and immediately) save you money. I'm going to be traveling for the next week and a half, but conveniently Mike Ivanov, our VP of Marketing, will be giving a webinar on this very topic while I'm away. Mike will be presenti...
One of the adages of the storage industry has been "Fibre Channel and SCSI drives are more reliable than SATA and PATA drives". This has always confused me. The technology in the spindles just doesn't change that much, and in the past the difference between the SCSI and ATA models of a drive may have been as little as different drive electronics on the same spindle. How could SCSI drives have been more reliable? Could it have something to do...
I've been writing an awful lot about deduplication lately, how it works, how it doesn't, and how Permabit does it. I've been drumming it up a lot, so now I'm going to turn the tables and say something different: Deduplication doesn't matter. No, I'm not contradicting myself. When you set out to buy an archive storage product, there are things that are features and things that are product characteristics. Examples of features are NFS protocol...
As I wrote about last month, hash collisions are not something to be concerned about in a properly designed deduplicating storage system, despite what some FUD vendors would like you to think. You don't have to take just my word for it; Curtis Preston wrote about this last year too. In fact, hash-based systems are the most likely to be capable of handling enormous amounts of data for deduplication; the challenges in building an efficient system...
Blocks and Files has rapidly become one of my favo(u)rite sources of daily storage news, partly due to content and party due to the understated, cynical British humo(u)r that pervades, continuing the tradition of more general tech news sites like The Register and The Inquirer. Most recently they have published two related articles on the maturation of archive technology in the enterprise, and I think both are pretty much spot on. The first, "Ar...
In the middle of an article earlier this week on problems with MozyPro restore performance there was buried an interesting nugget: A wildfire in July caused Santa Barbara to be hit with several power outages, which led to the failure last week of one of three drives in a Teddy Bear server's RAID group. Before a replacement drive could be installed, another drive in the group failed, and the foundation's data was lost. This is far more interes...