Beating the Credit Crunch

Yesterday was probably the worst day for the credit crunch and the global problems being experienced by banks. Recession is biting and without a doubt many companies are looking at how they can reduce their storage costs. Reducing costs doesn’t mean buying new hardware. Ask yourself some searching...

September 30th, 2008 | Uncategorized | Read More

HP Power Calculators

A while back I mentioned a meeting I’d had with HP regarding Green IT (and in my case specifically storage). As part of the discussion, I asked Lucio Furlani (VP for Marketing in TSG) if we could have Power Calculations for HP storage. Well, true to their word, HP promised and have now delivered...

September 29th, 2008 | Uncategorized | Read More

InVista – EMC's Problem Child

Remember when EMC offered a fabric-based storage virtualisation product called InVista? Apparently they still do, as a customer of mine mentioned recently. Unfortunately they had trouble getting any sort of decent reference site for the product and weren’t that impressed. I had a quick check...

September 24th, 2008 | Uncategorized | Read More

How much is your hard drive worth?

Have you ever thought of renting out your hard drive? So here’s the problem. Everyone needs backup. Most people are too lazy or inept to perform backups regularly. There are tools out there to use. There are online tools too which will help with the problem – but there’s also a fee...

September 16th, 2008 | Uncategorized | Read More

Lehman Brothers hits the rocks

The latest casualty of the credit crunch is Lehman Brothers who have filed for Chapter 11 Bankrupcy protection. See the report here from the BBC. I worked for Lehman in the UK for a short period about 4 years ago. If their banking operations was run anything like IT, then there’s no surprise...

September 15th, 2008 | Uncategorized | Read More

Cisco WAAS Deployments

I’m currently working on a project which is investigating Cisco WAAS deployments and I’m looking to validate successful deployments of the Cisco products in a geographically distributed environment. Has anyone done this recently? More pertinent, is anyone prepared to share their experiences...

September 11th, 2008 | Uncategorized | Read More

Large Hadron Collider, Data, Sweden and Nuclear Rockets

The testing of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider has been widely reported over the last few days and weeks in the media. You can find more details here. In simplistic terms, the project is looking to re-create the conditions experienced in the Big Bang at the start of the universe in an attempt...

September 10th, 2008 | Uncategorized | Read More

Moshe Joins The Blogosphere

Moshe Yanai of EMC, XIV and now IBM fame (I’m sure I don’t need to fill in the details) is now blogging. You can catch up with him here. As previously requested, I’m going to start posting my RSS blog feeds, starting with IBM. Tony Pearson – Inside System Storage Blog –...

September 9th, 2008 | Uncategorized | Read More

IBM's Storage Announcements

Today IBM made a slew of new product announcements. None of it was a surprise due to lots of pre-announcement leaks and the fact the IBM session in Montpelier was to a certain degree the formal announcement of products already mentioned in standard press releases. I can only describe the new product...

September 8th, 2008 | Uncategorized | Read More

Whatever Happened to Hybrid Drives?

Over 18 months ago, I discussed in a post (here) the Hybrid Storage Alliance who were looking to increase the performance of hard drives by adding large amounts of flash to each device. But where are they now? A quick check on their website shows precious little information. In fact what’s on...

September 5th, 2008 | Uncategorized | Read More

Archive for September, 2008