Samsung have announced a hybrid hard disk for use with Windows Vista. The announcement is here http://www.samsung.com/PressCenter/PressRelease/PressRelease.asp?seq=20060517_0000255266

Basically, the disk just has more cache memory, 128MB or 256MB, but crucially, can use the cache as an extension of the hard disk as a staging area. This allows (dependent on traffic type) for the [...]

Fibre channel storage speeds are now up to 10Gb/s as I’m sure we’re all aware. Brocade, McDATA and Cisco all have 4Gb/s products. Question is, are they really necessary?

Pushing a full 1 or 2Gb/s of data across a fibre channel connection at a sustained rate requires some decent processing power, so why move things [...]

It has been 50 years since the first hard disk drive was invented by IBM. It had a capacity of a mere 5MB. Contrast that today with the latest 500GB drive from Hitachi. In 50 years, that’s an increase of 2000-fold capacity each year!

There’s no doubting disk drives [...]

I’ve been thinking about green issues this week after we received our “bottle box” from the local council to encourage us to recycle glass bottles and jars. In particular, my thoughts were drawn to the environmental friendliness of datacentres, or not as the case may be.

Datacentres are getting more demanding in their power and [...]

This week I’ve been thinking a bit more about storage virtualisation. I’m planning to implement virtualisation using the HDS USP product. The decision to use HDS has been based on the need to supply large amounts of lower tiered storage (development data) but retain the functionality to production tiers for data mobility. Using [...]