Category Archives: System quality

New wireless technology augmenting data center cabling

Posted on December 20, 2011 by Ray

I read a report today in Technology Review about how Bouncing data would speed up data centers, which talked about using wireless technology and special ceiling tiles to create dedicated data links between servers.  The wireless signal was in the 60Ghz … Continue reading →

Posted in Distributed computing, Networking, System quality, Wireless | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

IT as a service on the Cloud is not the end

Posted on November 17, 2011 by Ray

[Long post] Read another intriguing post by David Vellente at Wikibon today about the emergence of IT shops becoming service organizations to their industries using the cloud to hosting these services.  I am not in complete agreement with Dave but … Continue reading →

Posted in Cloud services, Information economy, Market dynamics, Strategic Inflection Points, System effectiveness, System quality | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Our long romance with Apple technology

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Ray

  We all heard last night of the passing of Steve Jobs.  But rather than going over his life I would like to here discuss some of the Apple products I have used over my life and how they affected … Continue reading →

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Commodity hardware debate heats up again

Posted on September 27, 2011 by Ray

A post by Chris M. Evans, in his The Storage Architect blog (Intel inside storage arrays) re-invigorated the discussion we had last year on commodity hardware always loses. But buried in the comments was one from Michael Hay (HDS) which pointed … Continue reading →

Posted in Distributed computing, Market dynamics, R&D measures, Strategic Inflection Points, System effectiveness, System quality | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

IBM research introduces SyNAPSE chip

Posted on August 18, 2011 by Ray

IBM with the help of a Columbia, Cornell, University of Wisconsin (Madison) and University of California creates the first generation of neuromorphic chips (press release and video) which mimics the human brain’s computational architecture implemented via silicon.  The chip is a … Continue reading →

Posted in Distributed computing, Strategic Inflection Points, Strategy, System quality, Systems, Visionary leadershp | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Is FC dead?!

Posted on August 9, 2011 by Ray

Was at the Pacific Crest/Mosaic annual conference cocktail hour last night surrounded by a bunch of iSCSI/NAS storage vendors and they made the statement that FC is dead. Apparently, 40GbE is just around the corner and 10GbE cards have started … Continue reading →

Posted in Block Storage, Ethernet, FC, FCoE, Storage performance, Strategic Inflection Points, System effectiveness, System quality | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

Intel’s 320 SSD “8MB problem”

Posted on July 26, 2011 by Ray

Read a recent news item on Intel being able to replicate their 320 SSD 8MB problem that some customers have been complaining about. Apparently the problem occurs when power is suddenly removed from the device.  The end result is that … Continue reading →

Posted in Data integrity, SSD storage, System effectiveness, System quality | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Potential data loss using SSD RAID groups

Posted on May 19, 2011 by Ray

The problem with SSDs is that they typically all fail at some level of data writes, called the write endurance specification. As such, if you purchase multiple drives from the same vendor and put them in a RAID group, sometimes … Continue reading →

Posted in Block Storage, Data, Data availability, Data integrity, Disk storage, File Storage, Storage, Storage availability, System effectiveness, System quality | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments