Data Center Advisors

Today I want to draw attention to the the 2012 IEEE(*1) Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage Systems Award, which was granted to Dr. Naoya Takahashi.  The Hitachi press release details several of of Dr. Takahashi’s achievements, and I want key off this statement in the release:

So it’s time for that all-too-rare vacation to somewhere. I’ll undoubtedly trigger an out-of-office message that says I’ll not be checking email, voicemail, or any other kind of “mail”, but probably will sneak in an occasional digital-check, if I can. That said, I’ll also be traveling in places where electricity, much less wireless, should ever [...]

I’m sure many of you have seen EMC’s latest product announcement, the VMAXe. It’s basically a “mini” VMAX which makes the name rather oxymoronic (VMAXmini?), I think. But I’d like to use that announcement to point out a basic difference in the storage strategies of our two companies.

Have you watched Apple’s Lion and iOS 5 keynotes? Being the fanboy that I am, I snuck a peek on my AppleTV and was greeted with several new concepts including making the cloud invisible.  I was, however, struck by a comment from Steve Jobs that I’d like to address:

This blog is the first in a series of short articles I plan on writing over the next several weeks describing capacity optimization techniques and designs. This series will describe various standard data manipulation algorithms for reducing the amount of storage required to store data such as single instancing, compression and de-duplication.