Posts by Federica Monsone

I've had Blackberry handsets since the trackpad was first launched. I still have all the ones I had (bar the first one actually), stored in a drawer. The combination of their form factors and the physical keyboards are way better than any of the alternatives around IMO. I don't want a large, heavy phone - I want something that still looks like a phone and not a phablet. My Key1 is still doing well a couple of years on. I hope that by the time it give up the ghost someone will have come up with a phone that is just as small and that offers a physical tablet. The end of an era :-(

Software-defined data centre. Any takers?

VMware and others are aggressively pushing the idea of the “software-defined data centre". Which organisations or use cases will be early adopters of software-defined data centres? Which organisations are likely to benefit most?

How do you identify I/O hotspots and how do you address them?

Quick question:

How can I/O hot spots best be identified and what technology is out there to help IT managers to manage them in a virtualised environment?

Is data protection really heading towards consolidation?

It’s been said that the data protection industry is heading towards a consolidated approach, yet research has shown that many organisations are still relying on several data protection solutions, so what really is happening?

The benefits of server virtualisation are compelling and are driving the transition to large-scale virtual server roll outs; cost savings through server consolidation and business flexibility are certainly appealing.

However, the desire for virtual server deployments is showing consequences for data storage and data protection. The consolidation of physical servers is resulting in already limited resources being made even scarcer and with extremely demanding SLAs for supporting such critical applications.

With such a shift towards virtualised datacentres and 24 hour monitoring, there is a need to rethink the traditional data protection techniques. Are they still doing the job? Or is today’s virtual datacentre a different beast, one that you need new, more suitable tools to protect?

Flash storage industry: confusing or what?

Over the last year or so, there has been a flurry of new entrants in the storage industry. Many of these vendors utilise flash in some way with some breaking significant new ground in offering new opportunities for data centre managers to optimise their environment.

And customers are getting more confused and frustrated with our industry because of the lack of clear market segmentation between the various solutions e.g:

- Server-resident flash: very high IOPS, very low latency and capacity (vendor, vendor, vendor, etc)

- Storage-networked, all-flash array: very high IOPs, low latency and moderate capacity (vendor, vendor, vendor, etc)

- Storage-networked array: high IOPs, low latency but high capacity (Nexenta, Nimble, Tegile, etc).

Will this confusion end? Will the industry consolidate? How long before end users can make educated, knowledgeable decisions on flash?

Does it make sense to use shared storage with Hadoop?

Question for anyone deploying Hadoop:

the typical HDFS deployment is with local drives inside the compute nodes. However, as more data is stored on the cluster, are there any advantages to shared storage? When, if ever, does it make sense to use shared storage with Hadoop?

Chris,

It's a very interesting point but I think there are at least three reasons why this might not happen:

1. in the socialsphere you can be who you like; how could the government prove that the online person is indeed you? Even when it comes to camera footage from CCTV systems (at least here in the UK), such 'proof' is only treated as a likeness of a person, it is not admitted as proof that whoever is in the recording is indeed someone specific

2. people choose what to disclose on Facebook, Google+ etc. so the info posted there by someone and/or their contacts/acquaintances is not necessarily a balanced portrait of a person

3. I don't know anyone who would voluntarily disclose in the socialsphere the information the (UK) government currently demands of its residents/citizens (I know having been a UK former for 20 years and the latter for just under one) just because it's private and confidential.

So while the power that some websites might end up having in terms of how much they know about people could make an interesting Tinseltown movie, I'm not sure the Information Commissioner’s Office is going to turn to Facebook, Amazon or Google for information anytime soon.

Too cheap for regrets

Given the low (and dropping) cost of having a third-party store your data I would much rather pay and keep everything I might ever want to look back at, than delete it only to regret it because I chose not to spend a few dollars/pounds/euros. Especially since with all the regulations flying around who is truly sure of what must and mustn't be kept? Would you not rather keep everything and know that no matter what data you need to retrieve, you can?

Same here. As per my email to Chris, I'm finding that navigating is the hard bit. Where is stuff? And is there a way to 'hot tag' people? E.g. if I mention Drewc in a post, is there any way to flag this mention to Drew, a' la Twitter and Facebook? Thanks,

Fred

Just trying this out

After trying to reply to a post by Phil Mitchell which seems not to have worked (but then it could have been a mistake on my part), I am trying to creaet a brand new post thread. Let's see if this works. Fred

The drive shortages in Thailand are indeed a serious issue but end users should not panic; to borrow a much-loved cliché this is the time to really do more with less. The drive shortage and price increase validate the critical need for deployment of storage optimisation solutions such as thin provisioning, deduplication and performance and capacity monitoring. With the right tools in place, storage and storage network utilization rates can be driven up dramatically, enabling deferment of new storage and SAN purchases by up to 50%.

Len Rosenthal, Vice President of Marketing, Virtual Instruments

From Eran Farajun, EVP, Asigra

Precisely, and we couldn’t agree more! The reality that backup should be easier but actually is not is yet another reason that skills and procedures around performing backups are declining and are being out-tasked to cloud services providers. This stubborn IT task called backup is the bane of IT administrators over several decades. Newer technologies and methods have come to market, like new exercise equipment, but at the end of the day it is consistency and attention to details that is the key ingredient. Working with the right qualified cloud backup service providers is like joining the gym and having the trainer do the exercise for you, but you get all the health benefits. Technology matters, but actually putting it to practice consistently over time is what makes it work. Consistency is the hardest part of backup.