Hu's Blog

The other day while talking to a customer about capacity efficiency he asked, what should be a reasonable utilization target? With thin provisioning, he can eliminate the waste of over allocation which used to cause his open systems’ capacity to be less than 20% utilized. But what is the target?  Should he aim for 80% [...]

A recent paper in the IEEE Transactions on Magnetics Vol 48 May 2012 shows that the roadmap for areal density increases in magnetic hard disk drives (HDD) has slowed down to 20% per year.

In the last few weeks there have been some major announcements for magnetic storage hard disk drives.

Last Friday the markets were closed, so much of the financial media spent the day talking to analysts to get their views on the recovery, such as it is. One of the top stories in the US was around the job market slowdown in March, which had the lowest increase since October.

Hu: In my series on storage efficiencies, I posted on storage management efficiency. Here is another way that we have made our Hitachi Command Suite more efficient. My colleague Sean Moser provides a fresh perspective on software and some of the initiatives/discussion around it, I have asked him to give us his take on the [...]

Management efficiency is a key part of storage efficiency. The explosion of data and data types cannot be managed if we continue to take a piecemeal approach to storage management.

The choice of a storage system can have a major impact on the efficiency of an application. There are storage features that can enable applications to run faster and use less CPU and memory; they go beyond the performance features of faster buses, cache, and drives. These features require communication with the application, which enables [...]

Two events in 2011 are bringing greater focus on energy efficiencies. First, the Fukushima disaster, which has decreased the use of nuclear power generation around the world, has resulted in increased costs for other sources of electrical energy.

UPDATE: Since this post was first published, I was challenged on a performance chart that I showed. Since I did not have the details, I took this post down until I could verify the test parameters with the owner of the performance chart. Unfortunately, the owner would not release these details so I left the post [...]

This is a continuation of my series on storage efficiencies, looking specifically at storage performance efficiencies. Here are just a few considerations.