Archive for May, 2006

Hybrid disk drives

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...
May 21st, 2006 | Uncategorized | Read More

The Case for 10Gb/s

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...
May 18th, 2006 | Uncategorized | Read More

Managing Hard Disk Capacities

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 have also become more...
May 9th, 2006 | Uncategorized | Read More

The Green Datacentre

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...
May 9th, 2006 | Uncategorized | Read More

Storage Virtualisation

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...
May 2nd, 2006 | Uncategorized | Read More