Blog entries

Blogger Disclosures Matter

tmasters@storagemonkeys.com — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:47:35 +0100

Although myself and others here at Storage Monkeys have been railing about the need for transparency and honesty among bloggers, surprisingly few have adopted any ethical standards for disclosure of potential conflicts of interest. The lack of disclosure is bad for the storage industry, it's bad for vendors, it's bad for the bloggers and it's real bad for the commercial publications that refuse to develop any standard for disclosure.

One of the regular offenders of tRead More...

"You are an industry thought leader." Ehm, did you pick the right guy?

raayman@gmail.com — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:07:44 +0100

The title of this post was my first thought when I received the invitation to join the Gestalt IT Tech Field Day.

To start off from the beginning, I'm a regular reader over at Gestalt IT. "So what is Gestalt IT" you may wonder now. Well, on their website you will find the following:

We are collecting the best analysis and commentary from leaders in the fields of virtualization, networking, storage, and desktop engineering. ... We work with independent experts, bloggers, and writeRead More...

Chicken Little to provide cloud storage.

matthew.yeager@computacenter.com — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:59:47 +0100

The sky is falling! Cloud storage and computing are the next Hindenburg! Run for your lives! Or so some analysts, news agencies, and bloggers would have you believe.

Whilst there have certainly been some very high profile cloud computing failures in T-Mobile’s Sidekick, as well as Google Gmail and Google Apps several times throughout 2009, it is important to put some things in perspective.

Now, I’m not going to have a go at any alarmist heRead More...

The end of history? Or just the beginning ....

matthew.yeager@computacenter.com — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 11:23:53 +0100

Francis Fukuyama wrote 'The End of History and the Last Man' in which he famously postulated that, as far as systems of government and markets were concerned we had reached the 'end of history' ...democracy and the free market had defeated all comers and, as far as Francis was concerned, the only thing left open to debate was how to implement such systems and what controls were required for regulation. The book became a bit of a touchstone and rallying point for what would become known Read More...

Lo and behold! The EMC community expert! Or something?

raayman@gmail.com — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 07:31:52 +0100

About two weeks back (Friday October 2nd to be exact), I received an e-mail from Erin Capellman. She's one of the people working for EMC and seems to be at least partially, if not even full time, responsible for the EMC community network.

Basically it's the same as a lot of other online communities. People meet in a digital environment and exchange ideas, meet peers and get new information. Something that can be quite useful and add a lot of value to projects you are working on.

Does SNIA matter?

tmasters@storagemonkeys.com — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 13:34:53 +0100

To start, I want to make one thing perfectly clear: I want the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) to succeed. We all (users, vendors and everyone in between) need a group like this to work. It's in our collective best interests.

My concern is that SNIA is going through the motions of it's mission, but it is failing and it's only kidding itself if they they believe they are relevant outside of their bubble. On their web site, they claim that "SNIA is truly the voice of tRead More...

Microsoft / Sidekick could be the most dramatic Cloud FAIL yet

janpolking@gmail.com — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:31:16 +0100

CLOUD FAIL #1: This would be funny if it weren't such a data disaster: According to multiple news reports, an HDS SAN upgrade at Danger, the Microsoft-owned subsidiary that makes the Sidekick, went bad and it appears that the emails, photos, calendars, photos and contacts of Sidekick owners is lost. How data is COMPLETELY lost on a SAN is beyond me. Sure, some moron may have skipped his Data Center 101 class and not setup a backup... but do you realize how many things havRead More...

FTC Rules on Blogger Disclosure: Will Storage Analysts Pay Attention?

tmasters@storagemonkeys.com — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:38:42 +0100

It shouldn't be a shock to anyone in the storage industry that there are analysts who blog about vendors who also happen to be paying clients. It also shouldn't be a surprise that these financial connections are almost never disclosed... but that's going to change in a hurry.

In a refreshing move, the Federal Trade Commision issued new rules requiring bloggers and those who pay them to disclose the relationship. In the storage industry (and for the tech industry as a whole) there&nRead More...

The Aprigo Scan and Tell Promotion: Tell Us What You Think of Aprigo NINJA, get a $10 Amazon Credit

nathan@aprigo.com — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:24:36 +0100

Last month, we launched the private beta of Aprigo NINJA, and we'd like to hear what IT pros think of it. We're giving the first 50 qualified participants a free $10 Amazon Gift Certificate for sharing their thoughts on Aprigo NINJA. Here's how to get your $10 Amazon credit:

Sign up for a free Aprigo NINJA Account here.When your account is activated, download NINJA and run a scan of 100 GB or moreTell us about your experience with Aprigo NINJA

Let us know how you'd use Aprigo NINJA Read More...

Symmetrix access control: When unique is everything but unique

raayman@gmail.com — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 07:25:43 +0100

So, youve got a million dollar storage box standing there and want to make sure that it's secure? Sure thing you want to do that! And you ask your vendor "What can I do?". One of the replies could to use access control lists or ACL's. And all is great. Or is it?

From what I have heard, very few EMC customers in Europe tend to use ACL's on their Symmetrixes. Perhaps even for a good reason?If you take a look at the documentation on Powerlink you can find some technical papers on SymmetriRead More...

Computer evolution: And we continue to wait.

raayman@gmail.com — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 09:21:44 +0100

It's all about waiting when it comes to computers.
Let's take a short trip down technology lane and look back at "what was" back then.
For me, it all started with a C64. My dad worked for a shipping and forwarding company, and they made the change from punched or IBM card systems to a new form of computing. The company he worked for made their employees an offer to purchase a Commodore 64 and use it at home. So he brought home the first computer I worked with.

Cash for Captions Twitter Contest by Symantec

amandaj@connectpr.com — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 14:21:37 +0100

Backup Pros: Cash for Captions Twitter Contest http://bit.ly/sflVW

IT and Backup Pros:

You manage your company's information, but can you write a creative cartoon caption related to backup/recovery... and in 140 characters or less? Of course you can. Follow @NetBackup (www.twitter.com/netbackup) or @BackupExec (www.twitter.com/backupexec) for contest details or click here: http://bit.ly/sflVW

Buzz, FUD and Alpine

tmasters@storagemonkeys.com — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 14:40:18 +0100

Steve Duplessie has an interesting take on Storagebod's recent blog post on FUD - the art that vendors and solution providers have perfected that creates Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about a competitors solutions. Rarely is it useful as a sales tactic and it commonly backfires horribly if the information doesn't hold up.

Duplessie makes reference to the recent stories around "Alpine" (the highly speculated combination of Cisco and EMC) as an example of FUD. I'm not so sure that "Alpine" Read More...

Storage provisioning: Do you really really really need that much?

raayman@gmail.com — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 06:49:31 +0100

I received a link to an article where we can find an interview with Symantec's Mathew Lodge and their view on data deduplication. I couldn't help but noticing the following quote:According to a recent survey by Applied Research, more than half of all organizations expect to spend more on storage in 2009 than they did in 2008. But at the same time, the latest Symantec State of the Data Center Report indicates that storage utilisation hovers at just 50%.Now, that got me thinking on a couple of thiRead More...

Automatic Updates In IT Management Apps

tsahy@aprigo.com — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 18:31:07 +0100

(Read more on http://bit.ly/dbQeO )

It always amazes me how much interacting with your users can teach you things about your own product .

Last week we soft-launched our first free SaaS IT Management product. We were happy to receive some highly enthused feedback about our 'Automatic Updates' capability.

iPhone interface now available for Storage Monkeys

tmasters@storagemonkeys.com — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 18:33:30 +0100

We made some pretty significant updates to the Storage Monkeys web site this weekend and one of the more significant updates is a unique interface for the iPhone for Storage Monkeys members. To access the interface, login to StorageMonkeys.com through the Safari browser on your iPhone. Here is a screen shot for what you should expect to see:

Deduplicating Where It Makes Sense: SSDs

esoupy@gmail.com — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 07:24:00 +0100

I remember many years ago when memory was measured by cost per MB and buying software to optimize usage by compressing RAM. VMWare is doing something similar by deduplicating Memory usage across VM’s and calling it memory overcommitment. What is deduplication anyways but a marketing term for compression. The primary reasoning for deduplication or compression was to optimize the usage of a costly and Read More...

The 3 Levels of Disasters

esoupy@gmail.com — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 18:27:54 +0100

For someone in IT, a Disaster should be defined as anytime you need to recover data. This means you can classify disasters into 3 degree's or levels: User or Application Disasters, Hardware Failures, and Location Disasters. Understanding these three types and the reasons why a recover is needed will clarify the appropriate solution and costs for meeting or defining SLAs.

Defining the Data Corruption Disasters:

1) User/Application Disasters

ThisRead More...

Top Ten Storage Blogs (Non-Vendor)

tmasters@storagemonkeys.com — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 03:13:01 +0100

Congratulations to W. Curtis Preston's "Mr. Backup Blog" for winning the Top Storage Blog (Non-Vendor) and a big thank you to all of the nominees. The top ten finished as follows:

W. Curtis Preston - http://www.backupcentral.com/content/blogsection/4/47/ - 239 ( 21.04%)The Storage Architect - http://thestoragearchitect.com/ 109 ( 9.6%)Devang Panchigar - http://storagenerve.com/ 85 ( 7.48%)Stephen Foskett - http://blog.fosketts.net/ 80 ( 7.04%)Greg Schulz - http://storageio.com/blog/ 73 ( 6Read More...

"Disaster Recovery" and "Business Continuity" are not interchangeable terms

richardbruklis@yahoo.com — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 18:45:27 +0100

This bugs me a bit now. I never really thought about it much until someone pointed out the difference. Now I notice that people casually use 'disaster recovery' as a broad protection term for every type of IT mishap.

This is an example of a mis-use of the term from a large, well respected company's web site (2 days ago) .......

" There are many uses for this new feature. Here are some ideas to get you started:"

Disaster Recovery - If your local stRead More...