Storage

The Drobo is an intelligent and easy to use personal storage system from Data Robotics and there are a ton of reviews out there. This is not a review but a discussion on what I find compelling about this product and its core technology. To me it represents a leap in fundamental storage technology -- virtualizing disk drives for greater simplicity and efficiency.

It has been a long time since I wrote for Computerworld but, like it or not, I am back. The title of this blog series is Technology Matters -- a double entendre -- "the substance of thought" and "to be of importance."

In today's podcast: FTC asks Supreme Court to review Rambus case; Giga-byte to sell M528 MID in Taiwan; and Intel, Micron produce 34nm NAND flash.

Do different hard drives actually make different sounds as they grind to a horrible death? The answer is, yes. Some even play you a tune as they shuffle off this mortal coil, taking away your data in the process.

In Tuesday's IT Blogwatch, Richi Jennings watches bloggers dissect HP's recent surprising performance numbers, offering praise and criticism of Mark Hurd's performance. Not to mention the $6 million "home theater"...

Cloud computing is the latest trend in data storage. If you want, you can opt to forget about where you've put that important document your boss entrusted to you. Maybe you can even toss your trusty old finger drive because you can just send up all your data to the big warehouse in the sky.

Hey you Cleversafe folks, I really want you sitting in a box on my desk (well not you personally, but a storage box). Or on the shelf at Fry's Electronics. Yes, it's Friday, and I'm being irreverent, but where's my $89.99 scalable Cleversafe device? Have you been paying attention to what Cleversafe might just be capable of?

Sun posted a huge revenue loss, but discarding an unusual write-off, were things bad or not? Rain or shine, the Sun's still there.

In response to a comment - can the cloud ever provide you with enough security? I anticipate it will eventually have more security, and more in other capabilities, than any infrastructure you've built for yourself today.

These are the take-it-all-with-you days. For example, if you're going on a long business trip, you don't want to leave your videos home -- after a long day of meetings, you may need your copy of Iron Man.

I agree, the cloud is vague, but we're talking about a set of technologies that you need to understand. What's makes a cloud? It's a matter of what you're enabling a set of compute and storage services to do for some set of users.

In Tuesday's IT Blogwatch, Richi Jennings watches bloggers decode Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform. Not to mention The Equalizer, as you've never seen him before...

Steven Vaughan-Nichols recently threw down with Andrew Keen in his post "An idiot's view of open source." Kudos for Steven. I think he's spot on, but only touched on part of the story. OSS is the ultimate free market sustaining toolset, and we shouldn't recognize it as less than such.

Keep the fat out of your virtual infrastructure! Of all the technologies likely to optimize your capital costs alongside server virtualization, thin provisioning is probably the most significant (depending on the scale of your virtual infrastructure). But thin provisioning isn't available everywhere, and you should be thinking about what you're buying when you get a solution that does thin.

There are a whole slew of issues surrounding storage for server virtualization environments, but one stands out - data protection. If you're not taking your DP approach outside the traditional box you've likely lived in with DP, then you're probably missing opportunities. That means you might be wasting space, missing your protection goals, or just building a data monster that your infrastructure can't grow with.