Last week, in the midst of doing research on Flash/SSD I spent a good deal of time speaking to one of the foremost experts on the topic, David Floyer at Wikibon. We were discussing the fact that once Flash is cost effective enough (and we are almost there), and there is software robust enough to push the less important data to cheaper storage, as long as I can access that… Read more »
Defining Cloud
A decade or so ago, service providers made a valiant attempt trying to change the way IT managed there applications and their data. There were a few issues that played a significant role in the demise of service provides back then however. First, there was a distinct lack of understanding of the velocity at which IT can and does change. Quite often I see infrastructure sales people proposing solutions to customer problems that require more… Read more »
Fixed Input vs. Variable Input Compression
As a number of you know, I have been blogging about the merits of Real-time Compression. It may be of some interest to know that when Ed Walsh, CEO of Storwize, asked me to join and told me the company focused on "compression", I first thought he was joking. I mean the industry has had compression available for years. The reality is, there is no other technology like Real-time Compression available from any vendor, and… Read more »
Dell/Ocarina - Too Little, Too Late
On October 11, 2011, at Dell World, Dell announced a component to their DX6000G object based storage called an “SCN” or Storage Compression Node. It is interesting that Dell would mention in their blog post that this is “Dell’s first Ocarina based solution…” What makes this interesting is the value proposition behind Ocarina was its ‘content aware’ deduplication, not necessarily compression. That said, this blog post seems to be the ONLY information on Dell’s… Read more »
Storage Efficiency Panel - SNW 2011 Fall
Yesterday I was on a panel at SNW in Orlando Florida. The panel was hosted by Dave Vellente, Founder of Wikibon and always a great host for these kinds of things. On the panel was Larry Freeman of NetApp, Craig Nunes of HP (formally 3Par), Jarred Floyed CTO / Founder at Permabit and myself, IBM (formally Storwize).
Some interesting data came out of this panel. There were probably over 150 people in the audience. It… Read more »