Hu's Blog

As we close out 2011, the storage industry has seen significant growth based on budgets, which were established in the beginning of the year. However, over the course of 2011, we saw natural disasters, political upheaval, and heightened economic turmoil. Companies are now looking ahead to 2012 with a great deal of uncertainty around their [...]

In 2012, power, cooling and carbon footprints will become even more critical as energy demand increases and countries begin to impose carbon taxes. IT will be asked to shoulder their share of the energy burden.

Chris Evans’ recent post raises a warning that enabling the host to issue direct commands to the storage system via interfaces like VAAI can have performance impacts which can create more work to balance environments, simply because too many VAAI requests may be thrown at the array. Chris is quick to add that he is [...]

Recently a lot of attention has been given to Capacity Optimization, and there are plenty of solutions to choose from. Compression, dedupe, dynamic tiering, and thin provisioning are those most often mentioned, and each is effective in reducing capacity in their own way. Choosing the right solution is important too—for instance, using dedupe to reduce [...]

Recently, an EMC blogger admitted that, while they do not have the ability to virtualize external storage, they ship bigger boxes. He also seemed proud of the fact his top ten large capacity VMAX only used 69% of the raw capacity.  Yes, this is an improvement over the 50% utilization when they shipped DMX with [...]

I came across this interesting post by Floyd Christofferson at the Active Archive blog.

This week I participated in an Executive Briefing Center on the road in Mexico City. This is where we take a number of our executives on the road and set up a briefing center for a week for customers and partners located in various locations. Customers who may not otherwise have the time to travel [...]

In 2007, the Environmental Protection Agency predicted “the explosive expansion of the Internet and computerization of society would lead to the doubling of power consumed by the data center between 2005 and 2010.”

Last week the CIO of a large cloud provider gave me a list of his five strategic challenges for cloud. This list included technology, process, people, financial management, and power.
 
The key technologies are server and storage virtualization, which have a transforming effect on people and processes. The storage administrator’s role is to transform into a [...]

Automated tiering is one of the hot technologies for 2011, with all the major storage vendors providing this in one form or another. Automated tiering generally refers to the ability to move parts of a LUN or volume to different cost tiers of storage based upon the I/O activity against that part of the LUN. [...]