At one point during my days at IBM I had the title, Storage Efficiency Evangelist. My role was to help educate folks on the host of storage efficiency technologies that are available to help stem the tide of the data apocalypse.

Technologies such as storage virtualization and thin provisioning help with storage utilization. Tiering technologies help by placing the right data set, on the right storage tier. Data compression and deduplication help to reduce the… Read more »

As a part of being a storage evangelist, I spend a lot of time educating sales as well as customers on the merits of our capabilities and technologies. Every since IBM acquired TMS I have been hearing from our sales reps that it can be difficult to compete as others in the industry have capabilities in their flash solutions such as data deduplication.

I spend quite a bit of time educating folks that deduplication… Read more »

What had started out as a joke to a bunch of Californians has turned into “The Official Petition to Establish Hella as the SI Prefix for 10^27”. Today we have the Kilobyte, Megabyte, Gigabyte, Terabyte, Petabyte, Exabyte, Zettabyte and Yottabyte. Most would think that this would be enough to last us for a while, but apparently, it isn’t.

In 2009 we had accumulated about 1ZB of data. Just one year… Read more »

So the storage sector starts off with a bang when it comes to M&A, driving more consolidation in the market with Imation acquiring disk storage vendor Nexsan. Isn’t Nexsan the ATABeast storage company? How does one market a supposed enterprise class storage system ATABeast? I have to say, it was creative. I do give Imation a lot of credit for this move. It seems like they got a bargain. They picked up the company for… Read more »

Last week I presented at an event for Storage Magazine in the famous London Tower Bridge (shown here) It was a fabulous venue. Dave Tyler, Editor of Storage Magazine for the UK gave a presentation that talked about the "buzzword bingo" vendors play with clients when trying to sell them storage arrays. His main point was customers should not be "baffled by the bull$h!%" (and yes, he did say bull$h!%).

It got me to thinking… Read more »