Cloud Storage
There are 23 entries for the tag Cloud Storage
Funny thing about the advancement of technology, in most of the modern world we enshrine it, spend massive amounts of money to find “the next big thing”, and act as if change is not only inevitable, but rapid. The truth is that change is inevitable, but not necessarily rapid, and sometimes, it’s about necessity. Sometimes it is about productivity. Sometimes, it just plain isn’t about either. Handcarts are still used for serious purposes in parts of the world, by people who are happy to have them, and think a motorized vehicle would be a waste of resources. Think...
When horrid disasters strike and both people and corporations are put on notice that they suddenly have a lot more important things to do, will you be ready? It is a testament to man’s optimism that with very few exceptions we really don’t, not at the personal level, not at the corporate level. I’ve worked a lot of places, and none of them had a complete, ready to rock DR plan. The insurance company I worked at was the closest – they had an entire duplicate datacenter sitting dark in a location very remote from HQ, awaiting need. Every few...
Farm tractors and military tanks share an intertwined history that started when some smart person proposed the tracks on some farming equipment as the cross-country tool that tanks needed to get across a rubble and shell-hole strewn World War One battlefield. For the ensuing sixty years, improvements in one set of tracks spurred improvements in the other. Early on it was the farm vehicles developing improvements, but through World War Two and even some today, tanks did most of the developing. That is simply a case of experience. Farmers and farm tractor manufacturers had more experience when...
It is interesting to me the number of variant Transformers that have been put out over the years, and the effect that has on those who like transformers. There are four different “Construction Devastator” figures put out over the years (there may be more, I know of four), and every Transformers collector or fan that I know – including my youngest son – want them all. That’s great marketing on the part of Hasbro, for certain, but it does mean that those who are trying to collect them are going to have a hard time of it, just because...
One of my hobbies is modeling – mostly for wargaming but also for the sake of modeling. In an average year I do a lot of WWII models, some modern military, some civilian vehicles, figures from an array of historical timeperiods and the occasional sci-fi figure for one of my sons… The oldest (24 y/o) being a WarHammer 40k player and the youngest (3 y/o) just plain enjoying anything that looks like a robot. While I have been modeling more or less for decades, only in the last five years have I had the luxury of owning an airbrush, and...
Every spring I get excited. I live in Wisconsin, which my travels have shown me you may not understand. I have actually been told “that is not your house, there is snow on the ground. All of America is sun and beaches”. Well, in Wisconsin, it gets cold. Moscow style cold. There are a couple of weeks each winter where going out is something you do only after bundling up like a toddler… Mittens, hats, coat, another coat, boots… But then spring comes, and once the temperature gets to the point where the snow starts to melt, the sun...
In nature, things seek a balance that is sustainable. In the case of rivers, if there is too much pressure from water flowing, they either flood or open streams to let off the pressure. Both are technically examples of erosion, but we’re not here to discuss that particular natural process, we’re here to consider the case of a stream off a river when there is something changing the natural balance. Since I grew up around a couple of man-made lakes – some dug, some created when the mighty AuSable River was dammed, I’ll use man-made lakes as my examples, but...
There’s this funny thing about pouring two bags of M&Ms into one candy dish. The number of M&Ms is exactly the same as when you started, but now they’re all in one location. You have, in theory, saved yourself from having to wash a second candy dish, but the same number of people can enjoy the same number of M&Ms, you’ll run out of M&Ms at about the same time, and if you have junior high kids in the crowd, the green M&Ms will disappear at approximately the same rate. The big difference is that fewer people will fit...
While helping Lori with her fishtank avocation, I have learned a lot of incidental information, like the fact that there are essentially three types of tank – reef, fish, and mixed. Reef tanks hold corals, anemones, etc, while fish tanks hold fish, with a minimum of incidental coral or coralline structure. Mixed tanks have fish who are carefully selected specifically not to eat the pretty corals, soft corals, anemones, and other tasty tidbits growing on the rocks. This is somewhat amazing to me, because in a sense, I share the Toddler’s view of fishtanks. He points and says “That’s...
As you all know, I try to keep my marketing spiel for F5 to a minimum here. I don’t hesitate to mention when F5 has a product that will solve your problem, but try to focus on the problem and technical solutions. But sometimes I want to crow about how good our product lines really are. Thankfully, Lori provides a venue for us to do just that called F5 Fridays. This week I guest wrote an F5 Friday article about our new ARX Cloud Extender product and it’s cool enough I thought I’d let those of you who...
The hype around cloud shows every indication of settling down, which, if you go with the Gartner Hype Cycle model means that the trough of disillusionment is yawning before you. But you don’t have to dip into the trough, if you didn’t ride up the hype hill. The thing is, that with this particular hype cycle, IT was the brakes on the hype cycle, wanting to quickly identify what Cloud could and could not do for your organization, while the business was riding the hype up. That’s good, it will serve to smooth out the trough. If you’re...
When I was in Radiographer (X-Ray Tech) training in the Army, we were told the cautionary tale of a man who walked into an emergency room with a hatchet in his forehead and blood everywhere. As the staff of the emergency room rushed to treat the man’s very serious head injury, his condition continued to degrade. Blood everywhere, people rushing to and fro, the XRay tech with a portable XRay machine trying to squeeze in while nurses and doctors are working hard to keep the patient alive. And all the frenzied work failed. If you’ve ever been in an...
We developers used to be obsessed with optimizations. Like a child with an Erector Set and a whole lot of spare parts, we always wanted to “make it better”. In our case, better was faster and using less memory/CPU resources. Where development came from – a few Kilobytes of memory, a much slower CPU, and non-optimizing compilers, this all made sense. But the rest of IT, and indeed, the business, didn’t want to see us build our Erector set higher, or make our code more complex buy more efficient, machines were speeding up at a relatively constant rate and the...
I was pondering the weather in Northeast Wisconsin this morning, it’s gloomy and oppressively hot. Between heat and humidity, I’d say it felt more like the US’s Pacific Northwest than the Midwest. And it’s been that way all summer. We’ve been plowed under with 80+ percent humidity for months, and every once in a while the temperature dips to remind us that we’re in Wisconsin. It is the last day of August, tomorrow is September, when cool and wet is supposed to start converging upon us. It will be a relief after months of hot and humid....
A RANGE OF OPTIONS Almost exactly a year ago, I inherited several sets of model railroad trains. Two full O scale sets and two full HO scale sets. They were in varying stages of disrepair, and I wasn’t certain any of them worked. I’m not a train person, but my kids might be – given the chance to try them out. So I took them all to different dealers (who would have thought that different people work on different scales?), and had them all looked at to determine which one was most in...
As I write this, Lori and The Toddler are on their way to the store, his first trip out of the house without a diaper (nappy for our UK friends), she bravely told him that they would go get some robots as reward for being a big boy. I told her that it was brave – possibly brazen – to take him out straight away, to which she replied “I’m putting clothes in the diaper bag and taking it along just in case”. I’m sure all will be well, he has inherited his mother’s stubbornness, and is pretty focused on...
The last couple of years have been painful, to say the least. Some call them unprecedented, financially, but I do believe that is pushing the descriptor a bit far, since there have been plenty of instances where business pretty much en-masse questioned the amount that IT returns for their investment and cut budgets, so the feel of this recession is not much different than what we’ve felt before, it’s just by necessity. The funny bit of this is that everyone seems to agree that IT spending still went up in 2009, just by a massively reduced amount. Since the pinch...
With thanks to Led Zeppelin for some great lyrics. There's a sign on the wall But she wants to be sure 'Cause you know sometimes words have Two meanings Since cloud computing has a bit of an identity crisis, and cloud storage is just starting to realize one itself, it should be no surprise to anyone that “cloud storage gateway” has more than one meaning. While they are all a...
At the end of the odd but intriguing movie Existenz, one of the primary characters looks at the other after killing a bunch of people and says “We’re still in the game, right?” With the implication that you the viewer really don’t know if they’re still in the Virtual Reality game they were playing. Sometimes, Cloud feels like that. I can just go “We’re still in the cloud, right?” Here we are, it is 2010, the pundits have been hailing cloud for years, and yet there is still a vast gulf of understanding of what is the cloud, exactly...
One of the things I have talked about quite a bit in the last couple of months is the disjoint between the needs of enterprise IT and the offerings of a wide swath of the cloud marketplace. Some times it seems like many cloud vendors are telling customers “here’s what we choose to offer you, deal with it”. Problem is, oftentimes what they’re offering is not what the enterprise needs. There are of course some great examples of how to do cloud for the enterprise, Rackspace (among others) has done a smashing job of offering users a server...
In the rush to cloud, there are many tools and technologies out there that are brand new. I’ve covered a few, but that’s nowhere near a complete list, but it’s interesting to see what is going on out there from a broad-spectrum view. I have talked a bit about Cloud Storage Gateways here. And I’m slowly becoming a fan of this technology for those who are considering storing in the cloud tier. There are a couple of good reasons to consider these products, and I was thinking about the reasons and their standing validity. Thought I’d share with...
I’ve had a couple of blog posts talking about how there is a disconnect between “the market” and “the majority of customers” where things like cloud (and less so storage) are concerned. So I thought I’d try this out as a follow on. If I were running your average medium to large IT shop (not talking extremely huge, just medium to large), what would I be focused on right now. By way of introduction, for those who don’t know, I’m relatively conservative in my use of IT, I’ve been around the block, been burned a few times (OS/2 Beta...
THE (STORAGE) WORLD IS A-CHANGING Innovation in the storage space seems to be at an all time high, and that means you have a lot more choices in what to do for storage tiering. Maybe too many choices if you are considering everything you possibly can. Seriously. Tons of moving parts underneath you at different layers of the stack. It’s pretty out there. Or pretty ugly, depends upon your view. A NEW KIND OF HYBRID The new hybrid disk being offered by Seagate, well evaluated in Storage...
