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 »

An interview about designing new storage architectures I did while at FedScoop this year in Washington, DC.

Say the word “infrastructure” at Strata conference and you hear people start talking mostly about software. One of the biggest lessons I learned at the conference was that no one really cares about the hardware that “big data” sits on. Now, I am probably the biggest proponent of the fact that “spinning rust” doesn’t make a company money; it is the software that can extract the value out of the data that provides insights… 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 »

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 »