Changing Enterprise Data profile – IDC
Rick Villars of IDC presented a study on the Changing Enterprise Data Profile at our APAC Storage Summit in Ho Chi Minh City last Week. He presented a chart that showed the IDC analysis of World Wide, enterprise, disk consumption by data type from 2005 through 2011.
(EB) Exabtes

 
Note that IDC […]

I have not been to the movies in quit awhile, so on my last flight from Singapore I took the time to watch an in flight movie. I happened to select Ocean’s 13, which starred George Clooney and Brad Pitt. As some of you may know the plot is about breaking a Casino in Las Vegas […]

After our recent Power Savings Services announcement, James Rogers a Byte and Switch blogger posted the following, HDS’s MAID Mystery, in which he said that this sounds “suspiciously like MAID technology”. This is not MAID technology,  in fact it can be considered the opposite of MAID Technology, so I posted the following comment on his blog, which I […]

Today, Hitachi Data Systems announced a new Power Savings Services feature for the AMS and WMS modular storage families. This Power Savings feature allows customers to power down RAID group volumes when not being accessed by a business application. These volumes can be quickly powered back up again when required. This feature should appeal to […]

Last week I talked about the differences between enterprise and modular storage from an architecture standpoint. Enterprise storage systems have many storage port processors that share a large global cache so that the application can continue operation if one of the processors has a planned or unplanned outage. The large cache and large number of […]

The Enterprise Strategy Group published a new white paper on Power, Cooling, Space Efficient Storage, in which they introduced the acronym, PCSE, for Power Cooling, Space Efficiency, and identified 11 storage technologies that could raise the PCSE for storage. These technologies included:
Thin Provisioning
Dynamic Volume Management
Snapshots
Writeable Snapshots
Data Compression
Data De-Duplication
Internal Storage Virtualization – Wide Stripe Groups
Storage System […]

When I landed at Heathrow it was raining. It has been raining for most of June and now July. I checked in to the Christopher Wren hotel in Windsor which backs up to the River Thames and I could see the river was already swollen. That evening the TV news was all about the flooding […]

In the last few posts, I have been describing the elements of Capital expense or CAPEX, and how new technologies like control unit virtualization and thin provisioning can address these expenses.
The other expense is operational expense, OPEX, which is composed of the following general categories.

The analysts like IDC and Gartner used to say that OPEX […]

No matter how much storage capacity you buy it never seems to be enough. Jon Toigo did a presentation several years ago in which he described storage as being over subscribed and under utilized. He developed a chart of storage utilization which I have taken and modified slightly, but it is essentially the same as […]

Fibre Channel, Storage Area Networks were introduced in the late 1990’s to eliminate the islands of direct attached storage. It promised to consolidate storage and centralize management of storage and data resources.  The assumption was that this consolidation and centralization would lead to better utilization of storage capacity which was then about 20 to 30%. […]