Alex Galbraith hear from SNIA last year at Storage Field Day, and takes a look at the Swordfish. This defines the standards for APIs used by storage devices to make sure they’re consistent. Alex doesn’t think this will displace more proprietary approaches overnight, but if developed in parallel, may become a widely used standard. Plus, the project is designed to quickly ratify requirements when added by a few vendors, which should keep it relevant going forward.
Docker – State of the Nation (aka Observations of a Brit)
Alex Galbraith reflects on the influence of Docker, a post originally began after their Tech Field Day presentation from November. He’s recently seen the change in perception from an OS-centric view of the world to a more services oriented approach from a number of people. it seems that year of Docker hype are becoming a reality. Alex cites the increasing desire for organizations to automate code deployment pipelines and overall platform security as some of the more prevalent reasons for the switch.
Long Term Data Retention – What do I do?
Prompted by StorageCraft’s presentation at Storage Field Day, Alex Galbraith answers questions about long term data retention. This includes describing what the regulatory requirements are for long-term data retention as well as the consequences of losing said data. He also discusses StorageCraft’s latest backup software iteration which includes a local cache with cloud integration and the added ability to spin up a disaster recovery environment in the event of an outage to your primary data center.
Does Cloud Provide Infinite Storage Capacity and Retention?
Based on Dell EMC’s presentation on Unity at Storage Field Day, Alex Galbraith poses the question: “Does Cloud Provide Infinite Storage Capacity and Retention?”
Storage Field Day 13 (SFD13) – Preview
Alex Galbraith is heading to Storage Field Day in Denver, and has a preview post about the event. He’s excited to meet with all of the presenting companies, and get into the substantive technical discussions typical of the event. Remember, watch along on the live stream, and send in any questions on Twitter with #SFD13.
Scale-Out Doesn’t Just Mean Applications
Alex Galbraith reflects on what he saw from Rubrik at Tech Field Day in November. He thinks their approach to backups is an example of the new paradigm of enterprise IT. It’s natively a scale-out solution, not a legacy scale-up solution that has artificial limits and has to have scale tacked on as business grows. This is something of the consumerization of IT, Rubrik’s backup solution just works and scales to your needs, allowing you to rely on it more and worry about it less.
I Like Big Files and I Cannot Lie
The inimitable Alex Galbraith uses the poetry of Sir Mix-a-Lot to ponder Dell EMC’s presentation from Tech Field Day this past November, when they reviewed their Isilon storage solution. The most important consideration from Alex’s piece, who is this for? Isilon is meant for organization with tremendous storage needs, into petabyte scale. Alex reviews how Isilon addresses these into “data lakes”, and keeps performance at a high level.
Scale-Out. Distributed. Whatever the Name, it’s the Future of Computing
Alex Galbraith was inspired to write about the wonders of synthesis. The combining of established ideas to create something new drives a lot of innovation, and what Alex saw from Igneous Systems is a prime example. Their prime innovation, taking the abundance of horizontally scaling compute power, and putting a processor on each drive. This effectively reverses the typical storage scenario of have a small number of large fault domains. With Igneous, the fault domain is exactly one drive, making each failure negligible.
SPEP03 – TFD12 | Open TechCast
At Tech Field Day earlier this month, a number of our delegates and staff got to sit in on the Open TechCast. Give it a listen to hear Alex Galbraith get the latest takes from Stephen Foskett, Matt Crape, and Mike Preston!
VulcanCast Follow Up – A few thoughts on 60TB SSDs
VulcanCast Follow Up – A few thoughts on 60TB SSDs
Words Mean Things, Apparently – Deduplication Myths Explored
Words Mean Things, Apparently – Deduplication Myths Explored
Violin Memory Have Cool Technology, But Do They Have A Future? I Hope So!
Violin Memory Have Cool Technology, But Do They Have A Future? I Hope So!
