Archive for September, 2006

To Copy or not to Copy?

Sony have just announced the availability of their next generation of AIT; version 5. More on AIT here http://www.storagewiki.com/ow.asp?Advanced%5FIntelligent%5FTape. Speeds and feeds; 400GB native capacity, 1TB compressed and 24MB/s write speed. The write speed seems a little slow for me but the...
September 28th, 2006 | Uncategorized | Read More

It's not easy being green

OK, not a reference to a song by Kermit the Frog, but a comment relating to an article I read on The Register recently (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/22/cisco_goes_green/). Cisco are attempting to cut carbon emissions by cutting back on travel, etc. Whilst this is laudible, Cisco would get...
September 25th, 2006 | Uncategorized | Read More

Standards for Shelving

Just found this the other day: http://www.sbbwg.org/home/ – a group of vendors working to get a common standard for disk shelves. Will we see a Clariion shelf attached to a Netapp filer head? _uacct = “UA-1104321-2″; urchinTracker();
September 24th, 2006 | Uncategorized | Read More

Common Agent Standards

The deployment of multiple tools into a large storage environment does present problems. For example, EMCs ECC product claims to support HDS hardware and it does. However it didn’t support the NSC product correctly until version 5.2 SP4. Keeping the agents up to date for each management product...
September 24th, 2006 | Uncategorized | Read More

Pay Attention 007…

Sometimes things you should spot just pass you by when you’re not paying attention. So it is for me with N-Port ID Virtualisation. Taking a step back; mainframes had virtualisation in the early 90s. EMIF (ESCON Multi-Image Facility) allowed a single physical connection to be virtualised and shared...
September 21st, 2006 | Uncategorized | Read More

RSS Update

I’ve always gone on and on about RSS and XML and how good technologies they are; XML as a data exchange technology and RSS to provide information feeds in a consistent format. My ideal world is to have all vendor information published via RSS. By that I mean not just the nice press releases...
September 19th, 2006 | Uncategorized | Read More

A Mini/McDATA Adventure?

Apparently one in 6 cars sold by BMW is a mini. It is amazing to see how they have taken a classic but fading brand and completely re-invented it into a cool and desirable product. McDATA have just released an upgraded version of their i10K product, branded the i10K Xtreme. http://www.mcdata.com/about/news/releases/2006/0913.html...
September 15th, 2006 | Uncategorized | Read More