Missing Dedupe Debate Detail!

June 10, 2008 – 5:02 pm
The de-dupe vendors like to debate details of their solutions, ranging from compression or de-dupe ratios, to hashing and caching algorithms, to processor vs. disk vs. memory, to in-band vs. out-of-band, pre or post processing among other items. At times the dedupe debates can get more lively than a political debate or even the legendary storage virtualization debates of yester year. However one item that an IT professional recently mentioned that is not being addressed or talked about during the de-dupe debates is how IT customers will get around vendor lock-in. Never mind the usual lock-in debates of whose back-end storage or disk drives, whose server a de-dupe appliance software runs and so forth. The real concern is how data in the future will be recoverable from a de-dupe solution similar to how data can be recovered from tape today. Granted this is an apple to oranges comparison at best. The only ...

Posted in Data and Information Management, Data archiving and preservation, Data footprint and proliferation reduction, Data protection, IT Industry Activity, IT Infrastructure Topics, Infrastructure Resource Management | No Comments »

Comfort Zones - Stating What Might Be Obvious to Some…

May 26, 2008 – 7:58 am
Over the past couple of weeks I have been talking with many IT professionals who work in IT data centers of varying size from different locations around the world. A couple of interesting patterns or trends if you prefer I have noticed are that while IT and storage professionals in general see disk based backup as the future and for some instances, a good tool today, there is still very much a comfort factor with magnetic tape. The most cited reasons for continued use of tape being affordability, low power requirements, portability (assuming media is encrypted and secure) and familiar or comfort and confidence with the technology. A related trend or pattern is that while many IT professionals see the value and benefit of SSD including FLASH and RAM, there is also a concern or lack of confidence in the initial so called enterprise class FLASH based SSD technology. A related trend ...

Posted in Data protection, Data security, Green, IT Industry Activity, IT Infrastructure Topics, Travel | No Comments »

The Differences Between Singapore and Houston in May

May 17, 2008 – 10:56 am
In addition to participating at the Techtarget (TT) spring 2008 edition of Storage Decisions (SD) event in Chicago this past week, I was also briefly in Houston Texas this week to do a keynote talk on the “Wide World of Archiving – Life Beyond Compliance” at the Omni Hotel . Between the venue, temperature and humidity, I thought I was in Singapore with a sudden craving for pepper crab at Jumbo’s Seafood in the East Coast Seafood Center . While the Houston venue and those in Singapore were similar as was the temperature and humidity, the real difference was that I remind in the central time zone with a 2.5 hour flight vs. 25 hours of flights and changing planes. Both locales have nice people who speak English and have great food as well. If in Houston, check out the Omni Hotel and ...

Posted in Education, IT Infrastructure Topics, Travel, food | No Comments »

Spring 2008 Storage Descisions Wrap-Up

May 17, 2008 – 10:39 am
Once again the Techtarget (TT) folks put on a great event at the spring 2008 edition of Storage Decisions (SD) event in Chicago, tip of the hat to the whole TT crew. SD is known as an IT consumer/user event as opposed to industry events like SNW that are known as a vendor to vendor networking event. TT has added a new form over the past year that occurs the day/night before SD focused on the channel and var audiences with a dinner networking seminar called StorageStrategies . While SD continues to be focused on the IT consumer aka user, the TT channel program is a means for vendors to get in front of perspective channel partners to tell their story and value proposition of why they should be partnered. It’s a fun and growing event that I have been involved with for over a year ...

Posted in Education, IT Industry Activity, IT Infrastructure Topics, Travel, fun | No Comments »

Hot Storage Topics Converge on Chicago Next Week

May 8, 2008 – 11:16 am
Next week in Chicago (May 12th) at Storage Strategies, the event for channel professional held the evening before StorageDecisions I will be talking about Hot Storage Topics for 2008 including addressing data protection for virtual environments, power cooling floor space environmental (PCFE) aka green items and the "Green Gap", data footprint reduction for both on-line active and changing data using real-time data compression, archiving for in-active or dormant data and de-dupe for backup data. Also on the list of hot topics will be clustered NAS and clustered storage for Web 2.0 along with other timely and relevant items. At the StorageDecisions event, I will be talking about “Green and Environmental Friendly Storage” Tuesday morning May 13th in the presentation “Practical Ways to Achieve Energy Efficiency - Power, Cooling, Floor-Space and Environmental (PCFE) Issues and Trends” looking at different issues including the “Green Gap” or disconnect between messaging and common IT data ...

Posted in Education, IT Industry Activity, IT Infrastructure Topics, Travel | No Comments »

Im Leaving… On A Jet Plane…

April 30, 2008 – 5:06 pm
This is a test message of sorts while in transit on a plane at the gate waiting for the flight to depart from my mobile device. Hence this will be a short post however will be adding some new material soon both here as well as on www.storageio.com and www.greendatastorage.com where some new material pertaining to metrics have been added. Ok, time to go. Cheers gs

Posted in Site related | No Comments »

Power, Cooling, Floor-space, Environmental (PCFE) and Green Metrics

April 27, 2008 – 10:50 am
The Metrics and Measurement page on www.greendatastorage.com has been updated along with other pages covering IT data center PCFE and green topics for servers, storage, networks and facilities. Have a look. Cheers GS

Posted in Green, IT Infrastructure Topics, Infrastructure Resource Management, Power and Cooling, Storage and Storage Management Tools | No Comments »

More on Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)

April 21, 2008 – 3:27 pm
Here's a link to a new StorageIO Industry Trends and Perspective on the emerging "Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) technology". Enjoy Cheers GS

Posted in Education, IT Industry Activity, IT Infrastructure Topics, Infrastructure Resource Management | 2 Comments »

Happy Earth Day 2008

April 21, 2008 – 8:15 am
Its earth day week 2008, with earth day tomorrow, April 22, Learn more about earth day here, here, here, and here. Cheers GS

Posted in Green | No Comments »

Do Disk based VTLs draw less power than Tape?

April 19, 2008 – 11:11 am
The tape is dead debates rage on as they have for a decades which make for good press and discussion or debate during slow times, similar to coverage of what Britney Spears or Paris Hilton are or are not wearing. In the on-going debates and Greenwashing of what technology or vendor is greener to prevent global warming, some recent tape is dead flare-ups have occurred including one hinting that tape libraries can draw more power than a disk based VTL with de-dupe are discussed over on Tony Pearson of IBM fame blog site as well as Beth Pariseau of TechTarget StorageSoup site. I posted some comments on those sites along along with a link to a StorageIO Industry Trends and Perspective report titled "Energy Savings without Performance Compromise" as an example (look for an updated version of the comparison charts in the report in the not so distant future). The report looks ...

Posted in Data and Information Management, Data archiving and preservation, Data footprint and proliferation reduction, Green, IT Industry Activity, IT Infrastructure Topics, Power and Cooling, Storage Architecture and Access | No Comments »