Category Archives: data protection

IBM’s 120PB storage system

Posted on September 2, 2011 by Ray

Talk about big data, Technology Review reported this week that IBM is building a 120PB storage system for some unnamed customer.  Details are sketchy and I cannot seem to find any announcement of this on IBM.com. Hardware It appears that … Continue reading →

Posted in Clustered storage, Data, Data integrity, data logistics, data protection, Disk storage, Distributed computing, File Storage, Infiniband, Information economy, Networking, SAS, Storage, Storage architecture, Storage availability, Storage density, Storage energy use, Storage Features, Storage reliability, Strategy, System effectiveness, Systems | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

SNIA CDMI plugfest for cloud storage and cloud data services

Posted on April 20, 2011 by Ray

Was invited to the SNIA tech center to witness the CDMI (Cloud Data Managament Initiative) plugfest that was going on down in Colorado Springs. It was somewhat subdued. I always imagine racks of servers, with people crawling all over them … Continue reading →

Posted in Cloud services, Data, data access, Data integrity, data protection, Data retention, Data security, Disaster Recovery, Information economy, Systems | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Tape vs. Disk, the saga continues

Posted on February 25, 2011 by Ray

Was on a call late last month where Oracle introduced their latest generation T1000C tape system (media and drive) holding 5TB native (uncompressed) capacity. In the last 6 months I have been hearing about the coming of a 3TB SATA … Continue reading →

Posted in Block Storage, Data, Data compression, data protection, Data reduction, Disk storage, Market dynamics, Storage, Strategic Inflection Points, Strategy, System effectiveness, Systems, Tape storage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Oracle RMAN and data deduplication – part 2

Posted on February 11, 2011 by Ray

I have blogged about the poor deduplication ratios seen when using Oracle 10G RMAN compression before (see my prior post) but not everyone uses compressed backupsets.  As such, the question naturally arises as how well RMAN non-compressed backupsets deduplicate. RMAN backup types … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Data compression, Data efficiency, data protection, System effectiveness | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

EMC Data Domain products enter the archive market

Posted on January 18, 2011 by Ray

In another assault on the tape market, EMC announced today a new Data Domain 860 Archiver appliance. This new system supports both short-term and long-term retention of backup data. This attacks one of the last bastions of significant tape use … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, data protection, Data retention, Storage Backup, Storage longevity | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

SOHO backup options

Posted on January 5, 2011 by Ray

I must admit, even though I have disparaged DVD archive life (see CDs and DVDs longevity questioned) I still backup my work desktops/family computers to DVD and DVDdl disks.  It’s cheap (on sale 100 DVDs cost about $30 and DVDdl … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, data protection, storage economics, Storage longevity, System effectiveness, Tape storage | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

The problems with digital audio archives

Posted on December 8, 2010 by Ray

A recent article in Rolling Stone (File Not Found: The Record Industry’s Digital Storage Crisis) laments the fact that digital recordings can go out of service due to format changes, plugin changes, and/or files not being readable (file not found). … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Data availability, data protection, Data readability, Storage longevity, System quality | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

EMC to buy Isilon Systems

Posted on November 16, 2010 by Ray

I understand the rationale behind EMC’s purchase of Isilon scale out NAS technology for big data applications.  More and more data is being created every day and most of that unstructured.  How can one begin to support multiple PBs of … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, data protection, File Storage, Storage, Storage architecture, Storage Backup | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment