Data: Information Technology's Next Greatest Challenge
March 9, 2011
2011 State Of Storage Survey | www.informationweek.com
The amount of data generated continues to grow at 20% or more each year. While new storage hardware can adequately record all this information, we are losing control of the data itself. The current solution of simply adding more storage capacity perpetuates the issue. The better long term answer is to understand and control our information. Some solutions like de-duplication from EMC, Symantec, and Falconstor provide some relief, but not nearly enough to overcome this issue.
Managing Partnerships and Alliances
March 9, 2011
Growth with Partners - Alliances for Success to Deliver Customer ValueEveryone is looking for the "easy" answers for growth and often turn to business partners and alliances. However, there needs to be a model for mutual success for such partnerships to be successful. Managing alliances takes work and requires investments at many levels. Without such commitments alliances could be a fast path to failure.
WD Acquisition of Hitachi GST Creates Dominant HDD Player
March 7, 2011
WD announced that they reached an agreement to purchase Hitachi GST for $4.3 B. Unit shipments of the combined company could achieve close to 50% of the total market, assuming no share loss. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter assuming regulatory approval with Hitachi retaining a 10% stake in the combined company. Current HGST CEO, Steve Milligan will be president of the new business reporting to John Coyne.
Solid State Drives belong in the data center
March 5, 2011
The speed at which solid state drives can perform should make them a heavy part of your data center drive strategy. But somehow that still has not happened. We still see most companies sticking with fiber channel drives using traditional hard drive platters. This is in spite of the performance gains. So just why do we not see more solid state drives in the data center.
Can IT speed products to market by implementing Social Networking
February 27, 2011
Product development cycle times have been shrinking for decades. But the truth is that we have optimized the Supply chain from the manufacturer back to the suppliers for the last 100 years (or more). The new frontier for reduced product cycle times involves customer input and the ability to take feedback and execute quickly. This is not necessarily a new topic. Many companies have been doing focus groups and pilot launches for several decades. In the past, these efforts have been limited geographically or in participation (2% response was considered fantastic). And companies have been tracking competitive information for generations. The use of Social media may be the driver for faster product development.
Storage tiering for small businesses
February 21, 2011
Drobo has refreshed its new business oriented storage products. The new products include traditional NAS systems but also 2 SAN products using iSCSI. The business products come in 8 drive bay and 12 drive bay configurations. The 12 bay storage system support tiered storage using SSDs and HDDs in the 12 drive bays. New Drobo products reflect increased interest by large storage companies and small storage suppliers in the small business market.
Smartphone and Tablets may use the same OS but create different IT challenges
February 19, 2011
Smartphones are all over the enterprise. But most content on smartphones is replicated on a PC somewhere in your organization. The same is not true for tablets. Tablets have unique data capabilities and unique applications that many not fit on a laptop.
Tape storage capacities now at 5 TB
February 16, 2011
Record 5 TB for Tape by Oracle/StorageTek and Fujifilm | www.storagenewsletter.com
Oracle announced that the StorageTek T10000C tape drive. StorageTek T10000C will support 5 TB native storage capacity and 240 MB/s throughput. This is a native tape capacity higher than LTO 5 (1.5 TB) and 3.5-inch HDDs (3.0 TB). This product is used in new Oracle tape libraries that will store over an Exabyte (1,000 petabytes) of content.
Higher Storage Capacity in Small HDDs
February 16, 2011
Toshiba Expands 1.8” HDD Leadership with Smaller, Larger Capacity Drives | www.businesswire.com
Toshiba announced a single disk 1.8-inch HDD with storage capacities up to 220 GB. A two disk version would be 440 GB (larger than current 320 GB 2-disk product). 1.8-in HDDs are used in some automobile, mobile computer and AV player applications. Could a higher capacity iPod classic be coming?
Storage vendors gaining clout over server vendors in the Data Center
February 12, 2011
Virtualization of servers has reduced the effort to manage servers. It has allowed IT to spend more energy managing the data in the enterprise. This has resulted in an increase in the importance of the storage vendors within the IT organization.
February 7, 2012
SOPA and the wisdom of Yogi Berra
January 19, 2012
Larger wafers present a growth opportunity for LEDs
January 6, 2012
Smartphones threaten digital camera industry
December 1, 2011
Google music launches: The end of the end for the music industry
November 22, 2011