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Stephen Foskett
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Congratulations, Martin! You keep writing and we'll all keep reading!
Happy Blog Day
This blog is now a year old; who'd have thought it!! It seems to have become part of the fabric of the many storage bloggers and it's certainly become part of the fabric of my life. I started the blog as a counter to many of the vendor blogs I see out there; trashing each other products but oft...
You keep on writing and I'll keep on reading. We may not agree, Chuck, but you've always got something thought-provoking to say.
I have to agree about the astroturf. I refuse to engage in a discussion with anyone I can't identify. I don't need to know your real name, employer, and position, but I'd like to know at least two of the three. I believe folks can represent themselves, their employers, or both. But no matter, I'd like to know where you're coming from.
We always know where you are coming from, and that's refreshing!
Another Year, Another Blogoversary
It's that time of year when I feel obligated to reflect on my blogging experiences. It's been about three years, 500+ posts, around 600K+ page views, and over two thousand comments. Whew! What have I learned? Blogging As A Vendor Can Be Hard That is, unless you just want to recycle press releas...
What? No vStorage? I'm a one-trick pony I guess!
Kicking it off: VMware vSphere Blogging Contest
Welcome to the new VMware vSphere Blog! This will be the central place to check for news, commentary, links to new resources, and other information about VMware vSphere. Feedback about what you'd like to see here is always welcome. Your host and editor will be Mike Adams. To kick off this shiny ...
InMage is really one of those overlooked gems in the storage world. Sure they're tiny and focus on out-of-fashion CDP, but it's cool tech and it works. I do hope this deal helps spread the word that this tech is useful and available!
HDS answers RecoverPoint with InMage
HDS did a deal with InMage for replication/CDP technology, which in a nutshell, was a good idea. EMC has been out marketing RecoverPoint replication solutions in the midrange market very successfully for the last few years. HDS has been missing the right stuff in that space, so I'm glad to see...
I'd just like to highlight one statement from the above post:
"if anyone thinks [traditional scale-out block and scale-out NAS] can compete with Amazon S3 (on function or price), personally, I think they are missing something."
Amen, Chad! Amen!
And now – something just AWESOME for small VMware shops….
So – with all the back and forth in the blog-o-sphere recently, and with VMworld next week - it’s made me take stock of the last year…. We launched our updated Enterprise platform – for very large scale internal and external clouds at customers and service providers building private cloud struc...
I'll be there, too!
Watch for updates at gestaltit.com and on Twitter (@sfoskett).
Blogging at VMworld - sign up here
This post is for you are going to VMworld and you're a blogger (or even if you don't think of yourself as a "blogger", but have some sort of website that you'll be updating). Whether you're just taking notes of the breakout sessions for yourself, documenting your trip with snapshots, sharing s...
Martin is right on with the TCO comment. I recently compared all-in TCO for long-term tape to long-term cloud archiving (golly, I wonder why?) and we found it was a positive ROI to move to the cloud.
This is not to say that disk or cloud storage is cheaper than tape. It says that backup to cloud is cheaper all-in than backup to tape with off-site storage. So if the problem is protecting data off-site for long periods and keeping the solution going for the forseeable future, cloud is cheaper. If the problem is writing some data on a tape and sticking it on a shelf, then tape will always be cheaper. But I think that NO ONE has that problem!
Tape No More
I was on a course last week taking a trip down memory lane and re-learning all I knew about TSM; life has strange twists and turns but it made me think about back, recovery and tape. Every year we have the conversation about tape and whether tape still has a place and I think I am now personall...
Welcome to the storage blogosphere! It's great to have another perspective on storage, especially someone who knows so much about EMC kit!
Thin provisioning is interesting, but it's still only a half-solution to the utilization problem we've all faced for so many years. I've been meaning to blog on this, and maybe I will thanks to your prodding, but in short, even thin provisioned arrays will be purchased vastly over-sized due to the provision/refresh cycle in enterprise shops and poor capacity forecasting. In fact, thin provisioning promises to make utilization appear much worse not much better, especially in the short run. Instead of doling out 50% of an array's usable capacity as under-used LUNs, we'll dole out 10% as full LUNs. What could go wrong?
Looking forward to this debate!
Stephen
Why is Thin Provisioning Over 10 Years Late and What Impact Has This Had ?
I am sure you are thinking, what am I talking about, when I say: Why is Thin Provisioning over 10 years late, and what impact has this had. I will get to that in a minute. As this is my first blog, I will just quickly introduce myself. I am an enterprise storage specialist. In a later blog I wil...
One of the main differentiators of today's "real" cloud computing tech and yesterdays hosting providers and storage services are the fact that these new systems are designed from the ground up with multi-tenancy in mind. I can't speak for everyone, but I know that the Nirvanix system has very tight control over access between user accounts. This is very different from my experience at StorageNetworks ten years ago - a horizontal privilege escalation attack was a very real issue for us, a real nightmare!
These two issues (multi-tenant security and collaboration) go hand in hand. The APIs of public cloud systems enable both at the same time. This is the transformative aspect of cloud computing that I think most people don't quite "get" - cloud systems are programmable and will enable new applications we can hardly dream of!
Collaboration and Cloud Computing
I went to Cloud Camp Boston recently and led a session on Collaboration, after I sat in on a session about security. Both of these are closely related, as any collaborative effort must also have an assurance that the participants in the collaboration are the only ones able to access the files or ...
I appreciate the poll, Scott, but feel it definitely needs some qualification and explanation. Asking simply "would you backup to the cloud" leaves it wide open to interpretation. Who is "you"? Yourself or a business? Which cloud? What cost? What capabilities? You left it vague on purpose, I know, but this vagueness is going to cloud (pardon the pun) your answers...
Personally, I back up to the cloud every day, and have for three years. I know LOTS of folks use services like Mozy, Iron Mountain, and Symantec to do this as well. Including MANY EMCers. I also know of businesses who use cloud storage as a backup target, but archiving is a much more common application. Consider all of the Zantaz and MessageOne users! This has been going on for a very long time, too, and many might not even know they're "backing up to the cloud"!
Again, thanks for asking. But don't be surprised if the answers don't reflect existing use cases and practices!
New Poll: Cloud Backup?
I have added a poll in the right-hand column: would you back up business data to the cloud? The assumption here is: the cloud in this case is a public cloud or a service provider cloud--not your own private cloud. I haven't qualified this further with any questions about the size of organization...
Steve,
A prominent Massachusetts company is currently wringing their hands, trying to figure out how to respond to this encryption mandate with regard to offsite tape storage. This is a huge deal, and lots of folks haven't figured out how to deal with it yet. I'll be covering that in another blog post (tomorrow?).
As for enforcement, I agree it's weird. The Massachusetts AG gets to enforce it, and I can't see how they would go after, say, Bank of America or someone else outside the state!
Stephen
Encryption or else - it's about time.....
I've been harping on the fact that sooner or later (mostly later, unfortunately) all data is going to have to be encrypted if it's worth anything - to anyone. Most of us have been burned at least once by now - having our personal information stolen or lost. It's happened about six times to me i...
This is a really critical differentiator, and one that seasoned IT folks already recognize. It doesn't matter how good your IT infrastructure DR plan is if there's no employee around to use it!
Running with this theme, there is a public vs. private cloud aspect to this. Since public cloud systems are designed to run outside the firewall and be more widely accessible, they can be more easily used by displaced and dispersed employees. Private cloud infrastructure will need the same connectivity rush as non-cloud apps.
I ran with this on my blog:
http://developer.nirvanix.com/blogs/strategies/default.aspx
Stephen
Business Continuance vs. Disaster Recovery
A client sent myself and some colleagues an email recently inquiring as to how we view BC vs. DR. It made for an interesting discussion - one which I encourage weighing in on. Sometimes we take nomenclature for granted and miss some things. We all agreed that DR is a subset of BC - that essen...
I'm trying to figure out these numbers...
Let's start with media: $36,000 buys 800 LTO-4 tapes with 640 TB of raw capacity. $36,000 for offsite storage at $1 per tape per month is 3,000 tapes. This is a huge environment.
Then we have Avamar backing up 40 GB. This is a tiny environment.
What am I missing here?
The Cost of Backup: Soft and Hard Costs
Continuing a theme from the previous post, I want to briefly discuss the notion of hard and soft costs in a business case or Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) study. Hard costs are those costs associated with hardware, software, maintenance, operational expenses, capital costs, and so on. They are ...
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery? Can't say I disagree with Farley's conclusion!
Thin air for Atmos?
Storagemojo wrote yesterday about EMC's business model for Atmos and how it seems to be struggling. Apparently, there is a special sales force supporting the Atmos business that doesn't necessarily coordinate its efforts with the larger, just-get-the-$$$-in-the-door sales force that sells most ...
Once again, Marc proves that StorageRap is the only blog worth reading (and watching)!
It comes down to this: If Google misses out on half of the web because it's sealed off with nofollows or out of sight on Twitter, then their results will suffer. Remember AltaVista? Lycos? Heck, Yahoo? The masses have changed search engines before, and they can again. Google has a problem to fix!
And yes, it was a bit of a technicality. But this little technical nothing (nofollow) is threatening everything we think the Internet is!
Foskett forecasts Google lame-search apocalypse
My friend Stephen Foskett is a brilliant guy who seemingly never stops thinking about technology, except when attending Little League games. Ont Friday he posted on how Google searches are destined to lose their value over time by not including the most relevant links. Acronym junkies might en...
Chuck,
I couldn't agree more on your requirements for cloud storage to succeed in the enterprise. As someone who lived through the first wave of managed storage services at StorageNetworks, these two elements were always top of mind. Sadly, it was difficult for us to deliver cheaper/easier storage as a service using the EMC hardware of the time. We did a fine job of developing SLAs and meeting our customer expectations, however!
Looking around this second wave of storage services, I noticed that Nirvanix stood out. It's certainly got the cheaper/easier factor covered versus DIY internal storage. But the company is focused on the enterprise space, with excellent SLAs and metrics, sales, and support. So I took the plunge and went to work for the company myself!
Amazon S3 is a good choice for many use cases. Atmos onLine looks like a nice service, too, and time will show us exactly where it fits in to the overall storage services market once it becomes available in Q3. I certainly expect many, many of AT&T's competitors to join the fray as well over the next year!
We live in exciting times, Chuck, and both of us have put ourselves at the center of it!
EMC Takes Atmos Storage OnLine
Perhaps the first big announcement to come out of EMC World is the twin combination of the new Atmos OnLine service, as well as AT&T's new Synaptic Storage as a Service based on Atmos. While the new services and capabilities are interesting in their own right, I think they're emblematic of certa...
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