Overheard in the tech blogosphere » Storage

Overheard talking about compressed air energy storage

Margaret Rouse — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 17:21:10 +0000

If stored wind or solar energy instead of natural gas plants can be used to generate power when the wind is not blowing or the sun is not shining, less natural gas will be burned to provide dispatchable power.

Dr. Joseph Romm, The Holy Grail of clean energy economy is in sight: Affordable storage for wind and solar

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is compressed air energy storage. The definition is adopted from a blog post by Dr. Joseph Romm called “The Holy Grail of clean energy economy is in sight: Affordable storage for wind and solar.”

Overheard – cloud backup

Margaret Rouse — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 15:45:49 +0000

The marketing minds can put a positive twist on anything. Online data backup offers a lot of value, however, there are downsides you absolutely need to be aware of. There’s too high a price to pay to bury your head in the sand over something so important.

Kevin Beaver, Data security concerns with online and cloud backup technology

The WhatIs.com Word of the Day is cloud backup.

Overheard – near CDP

Margaret Rouse — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 19:40:07 +0000

Near CDP is a marketing invention of people who don’t offer continuous data protection but are trying to repackage non-continuous technologies as ‘kind of being the same thing.’

Mark Twomey, Non-CDP

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is near-continuous data protection.

Overheard – tape shoeshining

Margaret Rouse — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 16:10:49 +0000

If you put a single 180MB/sec tape drive behind a 50MB/sec to 60MB/sec pipe, you’re just asking for trouble.

W. Curtis Preston , How faster tape drives can slow down your backups

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is tape shoeshining.

Overheard – Tower of Hanoi

Margaret Rouse — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 19:53:08 +0000

The downside to the Towers of Hanoi tape rotation scheme is its complexity and the fact that not all backup applications support it. This method also has a tendency to wear out lower numbered tapes because they are used so much more frequently than higher numbered tapes.

Brien M. Posey, An introduction to data backup tape rotation schemes

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day definition is Tower of Hanoi.

Overheard – Pandemic planning

Margaret Rouse — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 18:12:52 +0000

“Most of the larger financial institutions have some kind of pandemic/influenza plan or at least a pandemic overlay to their existing business continuity plans, but I don’t know if I would say they’re all prepared to the extent that they need to be prepared.”

John Copenhaver as quoted in Swine flu puts spotlight on pandemic planning

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is pandemic planning.

Overheard – Deep fiber

Margaret Rouse — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 19:06:01 +0000

Pushing fiber close to the customer is generically called “deep fiber,” and various acronyms are used to indicate just how deep the fiber is. FTTH means “fiber to the home,” which is the extreme of giving every user an optical-electrical termination. FTTC takes “fiber to the curb,” serving a group of homes, while FTTN means “fiber to the node” or “neighborhood.”

Tom Nolle, Fiber-optic networks: Access network design

Overheard – Serial-attached SCSI (SAS)

Margaret Rouse — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 14:46:26 +0000

“Beginning late 2006, major network server platform releases embraced 3Gb/s SAS and there has been no looking back.”

Harry Mason, Serial Attached SCSI storage moves ahead in network server designs

Today I’m reading about SAS.

SAS is the only storage connect that embraces both the high-performance and high reliability disk drive offered with SAS connected drives, as well as providing native compatibility with low-cost per gigabyte SATA drives.

This capability allows common storage components to span a variety of storage environments, including tiered storage solutions. The ability of the storage system to scale is a critical attribute for enterprise critical data storage solutions.

Overheard – D2D2T (disk-to-disk-to-tape)

Margaret Rouse — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 14:12:10 +0000

With D2D2T, you can transfer your data to disk at night at a much faster rate than to tape, and then migrate that data to tape, as you need to.

Phil Pascarelli, D2D2T: is it quite right for you?

Unlike tape emulation, which replaces a tape drive with a virtual hard disk equivalent, D2D2T allows users to manage the storage of data closer to an Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) model. Users can specify the destination and duration of stored data as well as its replication and archive life. In addition, D2D2T offers an excellent data recovery option, allowing instant retrieval of lost or corrupted data. D2D2T is also able to address compliance legislation-based storage requirements.

Terabyte – two terabytes in the news

Margaret Rouse — Fri, 22 May 2009 18:18:58 +0000

The National Archives lost a terabyte disk drive filled with sensitive data from the Clinton administration, including Social Security numbers and Secret Service procedures. Had this data been on a self-encrypting drive, we would not have heard of its loss.

Pete Steege, The National Archives lose a terabyte drive filled with sensitive data

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is terabyte. A terabyte (one trillion bytes) is in the news today for two reasons — a terabyte of data of data from the Clinton administration is missing from the National Archives and Amazon has announced a new cloud service called Import/Export for moving terabytes of data to the cloud.

The interesting thing about missing data from the Clinton administration is that it was on a 2-terabyte hard drive that was left sitting on a shelf for a couple of months. And guess what? The data on it was not encrypted. What the heck???

The Amazon announcement is another WTH. The Import/Export service is being promoted as a way to move large datasets to and from the cloud (meaning Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).)

A terabyte is a lot of data and trying to push it up to Amazon over the Internet takes a lot of bandwidth. With Amazon Import/Export, you can move the data by off-loading it to a portable storage device and then shipping the device to Amazon. Amazon has a handy-dandy calculator for estimating the cost of service. They will charge you $80 for moving the data from the portable device to the storage you’ve purchased at Amazon (along with a $2.49 per data-loading-hour surcharge) and then they’ll ship the device back to you. It might sound pricey until you consider that uploading a terabyte of data over the Internet with your T1 line is likely to take 82 days.

And oh yeah, you may want to take a lesson from the National Archives and encrypt that data before you ship it out.