“The more fundamental requirement”

I long ago concluded that storage is the most difficult problem in information technology because entropy is always working to destroy our data. But then I came across this from a speech given by British mathematician, computer theorist and pioneer and Bletchley Park...

Is AWS rational?

The Glacier posts generated much discussion that revealed some non-intuitive ideas about Amazon Web Services. AWS doesn't care about profits on Glacier. They have other reasons for offering a cheap archive service. Glacier is based on S3. They do some things, like...

XtremIO’s slow start

The Seeking Alpha sometimes garbled transcript of EMC's Q1 earnings call has some surprising revelations about XtremIO and EMC's flash business. In its first full quarter general availability, XtremIO have continued its very strong momentum. We began shipping our 20...

Amazon’s Glacier secret: BDXL

Remember when Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced Glacier, a data archiving service, almost 2 years ago? Long-term, slow-retrieval (3-5 hours) storage for 1¢/GB while maintaining several copies across geographies. Pretty amazing. Less amazing now that disk prices are...

EMC gets the Cisco Whiptail lash

We knew this moment would come. According to William Blair, a British broker, their data networking and storage tracker (as quoted by the most excellent Chris Mellor in The Reg) sees that Despite Cisco’s public commentary about not wanting to leverage its Whiptail...