Which would be more devastating to a business: Having a hacker steal your customer's credit card numbers or stealing credit card numbers and then wiping your hard drives clean? This scenario is entirely possible, but rarely tested for.

posted: 5:00:28 PM  permalink  trackback ()  comments ()    

As a storage professional, your experiences and knowledge are valuable to other storage professionals. This is your call to blog. If you need space to blog, let me know and I will provide it. If you don't know how to blog, let me know and I will point you in the right direction. The important thing is that we start blogging.

posted: 4:41:26 PM  permalink  trackback ()  comments ()    

TQ White II also dropped by today and made a great point: there is no community for storage. Storage being defined as enterprise class storage and storage products (EMC, Sun, Hitachi, StorageTek, Network Appliance, etc.). He is absolutely right. There is no community and the vendors want to keep it that way. Once the users start talking, comparing notes, and have visibility across industries the vendors begin to loose control. Vendors want to keep the focus on them and not on the standards that make storage ubiquitous. There is no such thing as open storage each vendors has implemented the "standards" with their own features. Therefore, storage skills are non-transferable and are entirely vendor specific. This needs to change. The market will demand that this change in the as the focus of computing becomes more focused on storage.

posted: 4:38:20 PM  permalink  trackback ()  comments ()    

Dave Winer dropped by my site today and left an interesting and thought provoking note (See "Storage Missing from the Blogosphere"). He think people would pay to have their weblogs reliably backed up and available for restore. This is quite an interesting technical problem. The xmlStorageSystem, with some modifications for versioning and bidirectional streaming, to build an agent based system for backing up the statically rendered content of your weblog to a highly reliable and available physical repository with a portal interface for scheduling, restoring, archiving, vaulting, and destroying your backed up data. The agent portion of this system I find the most interesting. How valuable would people a system like this? What are the other potential uses of a system like this?

posted: 3:39:06 PM  permalink  trackback ()  comments ()    

I blogged almost every day in July. I only missed four business days, but made up for it with the weekends I blogged. My goal this month is to blog every business day. In September, I will try to blog every day.

posted: 7:29:02 AM  permalink  trackback ()  comments ()    

I spent some time last night pulling together lists of security blogs and storage blogs. You can see the results to the left. Storage is grossly under represented in the blogosphere yet it is the single most important computing feature since it holds what we all value -- our data. This is quite a shame since storage happens to be one of the deepest, darkest geek sanctuaries in technology. Ask any programmer about storage and they will simply tell you how much disk space they need. Ask a systems administrator about RAID types and they will probably ask you if you want mirrored, striped, or RAID 5. What about RAID 2, 3, 4, 0/1, and 1/0? When you get into the area of SANs (Storage Area Networks) and NAS (Network Attached Storage) is when you start loosing even the best systems administrators. The ins and outs of NFS, CIFS, zoning, storage security, and point-in-time copies will dictate how well an application performs for a user, how resilient an application is when recovering from a failure, and can even compensate for application design flaws. There is a lot that can be done with storage that most people, even programmers and systems administrator, don't know how to leverage. Storage blogs can bridge this knowledge gap.

posted: 7:25:47 AM  permalink  trackback ()  comments ()