Data Center Advisors

I was watching a TV show commercial-free on my AppleTV and an interesting thought occurred to me.  You see at the beginning I failed to understand the title of the episode, but about 75% of the way through I finally understood the title.  This also led me to an epiphany: the best way to name [...]

So here in the U.S. we’re on the eve of one of our largest holidays: Thanksgiving. Most countries have a form of this holiday, on different dates, so it’s not uniquely a United States concept and we probably copied it from somewhere else. But it is cleverly timed, in that it’s always on a Thursday, [...]

Welcome Back Barry! We were all wondering why Barry Burke had been so quiet on the blog circuit for a few weeks and lo and behold, we now find out he was on vacation. Barry, it sounds like you had a good time and I hope you did. South Africa is a beautiful country. And [...]

So I have been beating the drum of special purpose computing or hybrid computing through several posts and talking about it as something which will eventually happen.  Well with CSIRO’s recent deployment of a hybrid compute platform that uses NVidia’s Tesla processor cores, Intel Xeons, and a Hitachi NAS Platform system serving 80TB of Hitachi [...]

Last week at SC09 IBM announced that a Bluegene/P system with 147,456 CPUs and 144 terabytes of main memory was able to simulate the cerebral cortex of a cat.  Personally I find this kind of work extremely exciting and really on the bleeding edge of computer science.  One of the examples of how the simulation was [...]

Does HDP Make gas, or Just Removes Gas? When I was a kid, my dad was nursing this old Dodge Dart with a 318 cubic inch V8 engine that he drove around and was also used as the family car. This is back in the days when huge catalogs were sent to your house instead [...]

I’m always looking for alignment of ideas or logic or thoughts across a variety of disciplines.  For instance in past posts like “The Dance” I talked about the offload characteristics of electronics and showed an equivalent example in offloading typing to your hands — kind of let your fingers do the walking.  In this case [...]

A huge portion of Hitachi’s approach to storage is all about ensuring data safety.  At the core of our storage culture we very much recognize that you as our customers are entrusting us, Hitachi, to be the careful custodians of one of your most valuable asset: your data.  Data and its sister Information (note information [...]

Sometimes, when writing these blogs, I start seeing myself as more and more of a “storage historian”. Maybe I’ll petition someone within HDS to have my title changed. Well, maybe not; who really needs one?