The top storage stories of 2008
The world of data storage is changing faster than it has since the mid-90's amid the rise of hardware arrays and storage networks. Looking back 2008 will be seen as a pivotal year. The big news, in rough ascending order: FCoE Though production-ready products are still...
Shh! Disk drive at work.
Funny and provocative video (thanks David!) from Sun demonstrating 2 things: 15k drives are vibration sensitive - in this case to a shout a couple of inches away. That Sun's Fishworks analysis suite enables realtime analysis of storage behavior. Bad, bad, bad...
Cloud storage is a component
The cloud storage hype has been bothering me for some time (see Are there economies of scale in storage?). Even more irritating than the "storage as a service" meme. The problem with cloud storage is threefold: The availability isn't as good as a disk drive. The...
Garth Gibson on supercomputer storage
Garth Gibson, is one of the authors of the original RAID paper (pdf), CMU professor, founder of the Parallel Data Lab, founder and head of the Petascale Data Storage Institute and founder and CTO of Panasas, a maker of parallel clustered NAS systems. I caught up with...
Many-cores hit the memory wall
Everyone in the data storage industry knows about the gap between I/Os per second of disk drives and processor I/O requirements. But there is a similar problem facing DRAM support of many-core chips. Named "the memory wall" by William Wulf and Sally McKee in their...
Flash and the new storage pyramid
I got a note from David Flynn, co-founder and CTO of Fusion-io (disclosure: I've done work for them) in response to The new storage pyramid. He makes several points about the nature of the array model that I wish I'd made. Well worth the read. David Flynn's note: Geat...
The new storage pyramid
OK, it is still a pyramid Predictions of the storage array's death struck some commenters as premature. Commenters raised a host of issues: Cost. Low-end storage arrays are cheaper than clusters. Complexity. The complexity of clustered hardware - all those cables and...
Stupid storage failures
Valiant but doomed The ZFS discussion thread had an interesting comment from Sun's Jeff Bonwick, architect of ZFS, on storage device failure modes. How do you know a disk or a tape has failed? You don't. You wait, while the milliseconds stretch into seconds and maybe...
Economic crisis and the storage industry
Yes, Virginia, the storage industry will survive the crisis Economists and business leaders generally agree that the current, as yet unofficial, recession will be the worst we have seen since the Great Depression. The credit bubble has popped and we are facing global...
Atmos: EMC rolls the dice
EMC's Atmos, the product formerly known as Hulk/Maui, has gotten the full EMC marketing machine treatment. With a twist: EMC is rolling the dice on an unproven concept. If it's eat lunch or be lunch, EMC prefers to dine. I like it. The pig I covered Atmos' academic...
Recent Comments