Techno Musings

In a July post on the Techno-Musings blog, we made the case for keeping content/data in its original, unaltered form. More specifically when an application stores data/content in a non-obfuscated mode, it is possible to unleash the true power of the content. This is a key tenet by which Hitachi lives and breathes-ensuring that application

So, this is the third and final installment of my blog series on capacity optimization techniques. The first article was on file level single instancing and file level compression, which also included a combination of the two. The second article described how data de-duplication works, which I demonstrated by using Linux commands.

In my last blog, I described some past techniques and the current method of file level single-instancing and its capacity optimization companion, file compression. In this post, I’d like step this up with the more modern approach to capacity optimization—data de-duplication—and I’m going to show you how it’s done.

Late last year we did a series of shorts, at the white board, talking about cloud storage and how Hitachi’s existing offerings can help with getting traditional applications writing into the cloud.  Well we just released them and you can find all 5 of the videos here.  I’ve embedded the first video in this post [...]

There has been a lot of press within the past week about Google’s selection of EXT4 as their new default file system.  While Google’s performance numbers have yet to be published, the basic line of logic was that due to EXT2’s ability (Google’s current file system) to be more easily upgraded to EXT4 and the [...]

I ‘ve been reviewing Symantec’s new FileStore and their soon to be released S4 offerings. There are quite a few resources available on FileStore from their slides on the Internet to their product page.  Firstly I want to welcome them to the clustered NAS business much like HP is there already with EXDS, their Polyserve appliance. [...]

So we just announced HNAS 3080 and 3090 augmenting Hitachi’s portfolio. Note, I’m not going to belabor the technical merits, or the design approaches, or the value adds like the Hitachi Data Discovery Suite. Here is what I want to relate; It is rewarding to see dreams become a reality and I’ve discussed [...]

For new applications I think that we are seeing, largely because of AWS, that moving away from clustered or traditional file systems makes perfect sense.  At scale companies like Facebook, Yahoo, Google, etc. are finding that new approaches are mandatory.  However, I caution against saying that that file systems are dead.  There are a number [...]

So since I talked about my iTunes woes I’ve been finding continued mention of solving the problem of dealing with bulk data in the home.  Here is another article, from Australia this time, talking about the virtues of home based consumer NAS.  Heck even my own company has an offering in this space, which is [...]

There is a great article about GFS V2 — well that is the current name used in the public press — which talks about a new file system being created removing limitations imposed by the original nearly decade old version of GFS.  The key challenge: application I/O patterns changing due to increased interaction directly with [...]