Archive for January, 2008

Controls in Place

I work with many companies in which the storage and server/platform teams have to sign in blood in order to receive suitable access to perform their day to day work. In fact, for some organisations, it can equate to 50% or more of their time. I’ve been there and I understand and have experienced...
January 28th, 2008 | Uncategorized | Read More

HMRC Get Better And Better

Following on from the “inadvertent” loss of 25 million personal records, it appears that good old Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs have decided that online tax filing is not as secure as they may have indicated in the past (see BBC link). High profile celebrities, MPs and the Royal...
January 27th, 2008 | Uncategorized | Read More

My Drobo Has Been Ordered

I’ve been mulling over for some time whether to purchase/evaluate the Drobo storage device. Up to now I’ve been put off by the lack of NAS support, as the device only supports USB2.0. However all that has changed; I read today that there’s now the DroboShare, which converts the Drobo...
January 14th, 2008 | Uncategorized | Read More

EMC Stretches DMX Both Ways

EMC made two DMX-4 announcements today. At the top end, the first details solid state drives which replace standard spinning HDDs. At the bottom end the second announces new 1TB SATA-II drives (and other miscellaneous stuff). The solid state hard drive (or as Chuck Hollis describes it, the enterprise...
January 14th, 2008 | Uncategorized | Read More

I Stand Corrected

In a previous post earlier this year I mentioned the Onaro purchase by Network Appliance. As I said at the time, I wasn’t aware Onaro’s SANScreen product even had a NAS module. It seems I was wrong, and thanks for Deni O’Connor for indirectly pointing it out. In fact, SANScreen...
January 12th, 2008 | Uncategorized | Read More

Memory Lane

I thought I would spend some time tonight looking back at my blogging history. I first started writing stuff on a website I created called Storage Eye. The first “article” I wrote was posted in February 2002, almost 6 years ago. It was pretty crude stuff (the presentation, not the content),...
January 10th, 2008 | Uncategorized | Read More

XiV Part II

Following on from BarryW’s comment to my XiV post, I’ve been thinking over how the XiVarchitecture works. When a disk fails and the missing mirrors need to be recreated, then the data is likely to exist across all or most of the configured drives. Logically it would make sense that the...
January 7th, 2008 | Uncategorized | Read More

2.5" is cool

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (the old IBM Disk Division) have announced a 500GB 2.5″ drive for laptops. Not particularly interesting I hear you say, however these latest drives from HGST now come in Standard and “Enhanced Availability” versions. The enhanced version claims...
January 7th, 2008 | Uncategorized | Read More

Two for the price of one

The holidays are over and it’s back to work for me. In fact I returned yesterday; the break was good however it is also good to be back. It seems that I’ve returned to a flurry of acquisitions. Yesterday there was the heavily reported (on the blogosphere) purchase of XiV by IBM. Tony Pearson...
January 3rd, 2008 | Uncategorized | Read More