Dann Sheridan: Storage

1.2TB Media Library.

Thu, 02 Dec 2004 20:20:04 GMT

The TeraTelly sports 1.2TB of storage for storing and recording your music, photos, and video. It run a custom Linux OS and applications for video recording. Here's a full review. Unless this thing has a portable media player companion, like the Creative Zen Portable Media Center, I'll have to stick with my desires to purchase a Medica Center PC, preferablly the Alienware DHS 5

1.6TB On Your Desk?

Thu, 02 Dec 2004 20:07:35 GMT

Not via Firewire or USB, thanks. I-O Data’s HDZ-UE1.6TS puts 1.6 terabytes on your desk. Put it on the network and it might be interesting. I'd be interested in seeing the specs on this device. Unfortunately, the web site is only available in Japanese. [via Engadget]

A Rationale For ILM? Not.

Mon, 22 Nov 2004 22:15:58 GMT

This InforWorld article, entitled A Rationale for ILM, on ILM is nothing more than a weak attempt to perpetuate the fizzling ILM story. Don't get me wrong. I believe ILM is very important, yet extremely difficult to do today. The article is 12 paragraphs long. The first four paragraphs tell us how easy it is to set up a SAN these days. Five more paragraphs tell us how tape backups today don't fit into the ILM model. The remaining three paragraphs tell us an "ice age" in the industry is coming if we don't adopt ILM and point us to other sources that define ILM. There was no rationale in this article other than some pseudo-strategic swipes at how data needs to be classified for tools to automatically determine the most cost effective storage for a particular data type.

Speaking Of Personal Storage.

Fri, 19 Nov 2004 19:55:55 GMT

NiveusMedia has release a 1TB personal storage server. It's got a price tag of $2,999. I'll wait another year before I buy something like this. In 2005 I'll buy a Media Center PC and the gadgets required to make the stuff I record mobile. 2006 will be an upgrade year for my network and storage.

Seagate 400GB SATA Drive.

Fri, 19 Nov 2004 19:25:33 GMT

Whoa! In doing some research on Media Center PC's I saw HP has included these in their Media Center PC's.

Storage Forums.

Thu, 14 Oct 2004 07:02:58 GMT

I've been kicking around the idea of user driven storage forums for a while now. I actually started them here not too long ago. However, as you may see, they aren't really taking off. So, I'd like to find out how may people who read my storage blog would find these forums useful. I'm conducting a quick poll here. Your input would be greatly appreciated.

Storage Forums.

Mon, 04 Oct 2004 06:26:52 GMT

While driving this weekend it hit me how much work I've not got to do with the storage forums. The good news is that I can work on them from just about anywhere. Now all I have to do is set aside the time. This is going to be great fun and should produce quite a bit of valuable knowledge in the long run.

Storage Forums.

Sat, 02 Oct 2004 07:26:28 GMT

In the vane of uniting and connecting storage users, I have begun to set up storage forums here. The goals of these forums are: to connect users, separate the technology from the vendors, help new users get started, and allow experienced users to share tricks of the trade. You can’t have the technology without the vendors, so I have set up a vendor category with a forum for each vendor. If you don’t see your vendor listed, please drop me a comment or a post in the forum request forum and I will be happy to set it up. I will continue to structure the forums in the coming weeks. I did some research and found almost no forums on storage. The Byte and Switch forums are pretty much unusable. Other storage forums out there are peppered with advertisements from vendors which make it difficult to find the information you are looking for. Notice to vendors: you will get slimed here. Posts will not be deleted just because you don’t like them. These are open forums. I would suggest that you develop an accurate, honest, and detailed response if you find something to take exception to. Post your response and let each individual user make their own decision.

Storage User Activism.

Sat, 02 Oct 2004 05:50:17 GMT

Over a year ago I met with some of the guys at Enterprise Storage Group (now Enterprise Strategy Group), Steve Duplessie and Tony Prigmore to be specific, to pitch a new idea of developing heterogeneous storage reference architectures. They didn’t bite and I don’t blame them. It was an incomplete idea at the time. Part of our discussion branched into how the storage marketplace is completely dominated by the vendors. Every analyst and consulting firm in the storage marketplace is beholden to the vendors for their revenues, including ESG. Vendors like EMC hold the fate of partners in their hands. They know it and like to use the power. Other storage vendors like HP and IBM use storage as a lever to open up other opportunities in accounts. HP and IBM are so large, however, they can’t centralize control over partners enough to exert brute force in the same manner as EMC. One of the world’s largest consulting firms, Accenture, entered into a multibillion dollar partnership with EMC a couple of years ago. Accenture now finds the EMC sales warlords attempting to pillage their accounts. So how is the power wrangled away from the vendors? By uniting the users. The vendors have kept the skills and knowledge in the marketplace proprietary. There are movements afoot via SNIA and market forces like the demand for iSCSI to wrest power away from the vendors. However, these endeavors will be incomplete and the marketplace will remain unbalanced until the users begin to talk, communicate, and collaborate.

Inline Encryption Performance Testing.

Sat, 02 Oct 2004 03:02:52 GMT

I've been having a lot of fun testing inline encryption devices at work. While quite cool technology, I wouldn't recommend deploying this technology in production just yet. I saw much as a 53% degradation in performance in some of me tests. However, using these devices to encrypt tape backups might be a good use of these devices today since tape is completely mobile. Who's to say some guy at Iron Mountain isn't grabbing tapes at random hoping to find something valuable?

1TB Optical Storage Disks.

Mon, 27 Sep 2004 18:02:03 GMT

This comes via Slashdot. This is amazing; 1TB on a DVD sized disk. Could optical storage make a come back against tape with this kind of density? I can see scnenarios where you disk based bacups and archive to optical. Hmm, could this be a case of back to the future?

Storage Analysis Tools.

Sun, 26 Sep 2004 22:45:59 GMT

As I posted recently, I've been using IOmeter a lot. Now I am wondering if there are better tools out there. IOmeter is free which is nice but not required. I am looking for a multivendor (HP, EMC, HDS, etc.) storage analysis tool. Ideally, this tool should be able to address disk and tape mediums and provide a decent reporting facility. I'd appreciate it you could drop me a comment if you know of any.

Microsoft Data Protection Server.

Wed, 22 Sep 2004 04:52:40 GMT

An interesting article from eWeek on Microsoft's new Data Protection Server (DPS). DPS is supposed to help reduce backup and recovery times, reduce risk, and improve TCO. I'm not convinced since the major bottlenecks in performing backups, particularly tape backups, are the network and the media. I did a search on Microsoft.com for Data Protection Server and found nothing. I'll wait and see on this one.

HP Gives Big Nod to Lustre.

Tue, 21 Sep 2004 17:16:01 GMT

Powering HP's StorageWorks Grid is the code from the Lustre project, with some HP specific modifications. This type of approach to clustering storage is becoming more and more popular. Vendors such as LeftHand Networks use a similar approach, though their approaches are not marketed as grid solutions. HP seems to be glomming onto the Grid hype with this announcement. Let’s call this what it is – a distributed filesystem.

Missing Hard Drives Verdict.

Fri, 17 Sep 2004 07:14:13 GMT

The verdict is in for some employees at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Here's the body count: 5 fired, 18 reprimanded/demoted. All this over a few hard drives. The article never mentions whether or not the drives were recovered. What or who is to blame? Well, the government has assigned its blame to the individuals involved. I suspect it was more of a break down in process and inventory management. If the Los Alamos had employed technology that encrypts data-at-rest with a sophisticated recovery mechanism and NSA approved algorithms this would not have been such a big deal. The data on the drives would have been inaccessible to someone without multiple recovery keys and knowledge of the specific encryption technology employed. This scandal deftly highlights the importance of storage security.

HP vs. EMC Storage.

Fri, 17 Sep 2004 06:59:23 GMT

This weekend I'm going to be putting together a comparison chart of the HP XP12000 versus the DMX-3000. This won't be a full feature comparison, but just a side by side view of the vendor's published material plus a little bit of editorial thrown in for good measure. This came out of a conversation with a colleague of mine. This should prove very interesting.

IOmeter.

Wed, 15 Sep 2004 05:43:22 GMT

I've been spending a good deal of time with IOmeter recently. I'm growing quite fond of it. It does take quite a bit of time to execute tests that are statistically meaningful in even in a small environment. I'm working on setting up tests packages that can be run from a workstation, pushed to servers, executed, and the results pulled back without relying on the dynamo daemon. I would love to see what is going on inside the SAN fabric while I'm executing IOmeter tests, but FC analysis tools are very expensive. Maybe some day.

SAS vs. SATA vs. FC.

Sun, 12 Sep 2004 03:17:29 GMT

An interesting quick comparison of Fibre Channel, SATA, and Serial Attached SCSI drives. They hit the high points and give some great point advice for making a decision.

Open Source And Storage.

Sun, 12 Sep 2004 02:27:33 GMT

Here's an interesting post from the Data Mobility Group. Why is Open Source a storage topic? I have never seen a successful open source project in the storage arena, other than vendors taking open source software and modifying to their advantage. So, I wonder, how important is open source to storage? I seriously doubt open source will ever be important to storage. Why? The vendors keep their management and monitoring APIs closely held and it costs money -- a lot of money -- to gain access to these APIs. Even with SMI-S looming on the horizon, I'm sure each implementation unique.

GmailFS.

Fri, 10 Sep 2004 04:55:37 GMT

This is a great Google hack. This turns your Gmail account into a network drive. Is this the future of storage? You bet. Xdrive and others have tried doing this but have put an GUI barrier between the users and their data. Data access should be seamless from the user's perspective. Security, auditing, authentication, and all of the other OS functions and administrative requirements should be hidden. Let the data flow!

Disabling USB Storage Devices.

Fri, 10 Sep 2004 04:49:35 GMT

Via Slashdot I ran across this little tidbit on turning USB memory devices into read-only volumes in XP. As I have written before, USB device represent the single largest security threat to businesses today since data is taken out of band by these devices, rendering automated monitoring useless and leaving only physical security measures to deal with the illicit transport of data.

The First True Disk Based Replacement For Tape?

Tue, 31 Aug 2004 02:48:24 GMT

Copan Systems is receiving $25M in venture funding today because someone believe that have the first truly viable replacement for tape in their Revolution 200T product. EMC, IBM, NetApp, and other have been pushing disk-based backups for the last few years. The problem with the strategy employed to date is that disk is still more expensive than tape at the raw resource level, even though it may only be pennies per megabyte. These pennies add up over 100TB as illustrated by a blurb on the Copan Systems web site, “Current disk technology is still 3-5 times more expensive than tape. For a 100TB archive, that means spending either $300,000 for tape of $1,000,000 on disk.” I believe Copan Systems is worth a closer look.

Decru.

Tue, 31 Aug 2004 02:46:31 GMT

I’ve spent the past couple of days getting to know the DataFort product from Decru. The DataFort performs inline encryption of data, or better known as encrypting data at rest. This is an area I’ve wanted to get into for a few years. I last took at a look at encrypting data at rest in 2002 when I was working for AT&T Wireless. Encrypting data at rest is good for securing hard drive against misplacement and then being read by wayward sysadmins. The Decru DataFort is extremely easy to use. To put it into production all one has to do is assign a management IP and map zones containing its WWNs. This may be different in a NAS environment as we were taking a look at it in a SAN environment.

Hotmail Storage.

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 16:57:49 GMT

All of a sudden 2GB appeared available for my Hotmail email storage. This is the maximum size that Outlook supports. However, how much storage can Outlook Express support? I know a number of people who use Outlook Express rather than Outlook.

Microsoft And Storage.

Fri, 16 Jul 2004 07:05:25 GMT

EMC isn’t the only vendor forcing customers into gold plated solutions. Microsoft only certifies Exchange using Fibre or direct attached storage and just recently announced support for iSCSI. Why not NAS? On a dedicated network running gigabit Ethernet I see no reason why NAS would not work just as well and Fibre or iSCSI given the ingenious approaches to NAS these days. Fibre and iSCSI are moving SCSI commands and NAS moving NFS or SMB, but the application impact under any of these technologies given the state of networking technology is becoming less and less noticeable. The reason vendors like EMC and Microsoft only certify one or two configurations is to keep their support costs down and direct revenue into the most profitable product lines regardless of what might be most cost effective for the customer.