What a week this was! The HDS acquisition of BlueArc announcement was a great event. Members of the blog team (Michael Hay, Claus Mikkelsen, and myself) and executive team held several Q&As, as well as multiple briefings with media, analysts and bloggers. We even held a tweetchat, which was a great opportunity to connect with our followers about the news. It seemed like only positive comments (unless you are a competing vendor) about the acquisition were made, even from our toughest critics. In fact, the only comments remotely negative was similar to “…what took you so long?” which really isn’t that entirely negative, but more a validation of our decision.
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“Project Carrot” is officially complete! As Michael Hay recounted, our relationship with BlueArc has been an exciting journey over the past 5 years; a journey that we dubbed internally as “Project Carrot”. As you know by now, Project Carrot set out to evaluate and choose the NAS technology that would become HNAS. A small team of HDSers conducted the technical and performance evaluation for our “carrot patch”. After dozens of paper evaluations and interviews, it eventually came down to 3 finalists – Littlefinger, Resistafly, and Jumbo, aka BlueArc (If you’re not a vegetable aficionado, all of these names are different types of carrots.) Without doubt, with today’s acquisition of BlueArc’s talent and technology, HDS has enhanced our file and content services strategy and vision. It’s been a great journey thus far working with the BlueArc teams and we are all looking forward to a great future together. 
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These are exciting times we live in, indeed! Steve Jobs has officially resigned his post. HP has opened their kimono to enterprise focused strategy leaving behind WebOS and the PC business. And today we celebrate combining the innovative talent of BlueArc with the Hitachi family.
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OK, so I lied about my last blog being the final of a three part series (1, 2 & 3). But aren’t we used to being lied to these days? I classify virtualization into three categories of prose: one-to-many, many-to-one, and this-to-that. (Turns out, I thought I blogged about this some time ago, but it was a paper I started and never finished. I’ll extract this and post it as a future blog soon.) 
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I’ve been laying it on a little thick technically of late, so I thought I would throw a change-up in the mix before everyone thinks I’m losing my sense of fun. And, I’d rather have fun while working than working to have fun. Plus, my last post was rather long and voluminous, so here’s a short blog on, well, blogging.
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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.
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A recent article by The Register’s Chris Mellor was passed my way by a colleague, at a perfect time. I was planning to post a blog this week on Hitachi’s contribution to the world of optical and holographic storage, but I didn’t know how I was going to introduce the subject.
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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.
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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: Read More »
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: Read More »
