I’ve been in the PC world for a long time and I am still shocked at the footdragging by storage giants on many fronts and a lack of analysis into what consumers need from their storage devices.

For instance:

1. Make copying disk to disk stupid easy: less reliance on 3rd party apps. Save people time and headaches. Consumers don’t want to know the technical details or fiddle around with partitions and know what a MBR (master boot record) or even what a partition is. read more …

There will clearly be a large SAN market for secure enterprise computing for years to come, but cloud computing in my view is likely to become the standard for an increasing number of businesses and applications.    In an excellent Techworld article about the effect of cloud computing on the future of storage Chris Mellor observes:

Google does not use a storage area network (SAN). It has no world-wide network-attached storage (NAS) infrastructure. Instead it uses thousands of Linux servers with cheap disks - direct-attached storage (DAS) - and organises their contents inside its own Google File System (GFS). read more …

The tech industry has been buzzing about solid state drives (SSDs) again lately, but many questions remain.  Even after many major vendors (Apple, EMC, and Dell to name a few) have introduced NAND flash-based disk into their core products, it is unclear whether non-disk storage will fly or flop.  I’m betting it will find a nice niche, but that traditional spinning disks are here for a good long time. read more …

Darren Thomas, General Manager of Storage at Dell, talks about virtualization, the benefits of Live Migration, and the requirements it drives for advanced storage functionality.

Performance of storage devices often becomes a subject of controversy between storage reseller and the customer. There are always some false expectations, wrong setups and hot heads when it comes to performance. I decided to write about the trouble sources I’m meeting most often. I believe enumerating and discussing them might not only help storage beginners, but hopefully it will inspire storage vendors to improve existing features or develop new ones. read more …

For brand new SAN implementations iSCSI appears to be the likely as well as the superior choice for most IT managers.  Although there are some technical advantages with Fibre Channel in most cases these appear unlikely to justify the higher costs of Fibre Channel compared to iSCSI.

Security issues with iSCSI are largely unjustified due to misunderstandings about the architecture.  Contrary to some suggestions,  iSCSI does not carry most of the types of security risks associated with remotely hosted and remotely accessed internet applications. read more …

Years ago, everybody thought that IT was about computers with an internal disk running an operating system, and tapedrives to store corporate data. And look where we are now. An evolution in the way we use storage space has already taken place.

Where hard disk space used to grow enormously internally in computers, that has come to a halt, and external storage has taken part of its place. All kinds of people walk around with USB drives, and NAS has become a regular term like spaghetti and cheese. read more …

Along with my professional focus on enterprise storage systems, I’m enamored of home networking, and recently passed the two terabyte mark at home! Along with David Mould’s post on the 19th, this got me thinking about where home storage is heading.

Past Failures: Home Servers

Home storage appliances and servers have come and gone over the year, with none seeming to make much of a mark. The market remains littered with UPNP media servers and home NAS boxes dashed on the shoals of an unappreciative public. Nearly every home network device company has produced one or two home storage servers, none of which have succeeded. read more …