“In Silicon Valley, data centers are heating up with startups like Pure Storage and Nimble Storage pulling in massive funding rounds and Michael Dell announcing a storage-focused investment fund,” writes Christina Farr at VentureBeat.

• Nexenta, a software-based storage company, received $24 million this week in its fourth round of financing from new investors Four Rivers Group, Presidio Ventures, and UMC Capital with participation by existing Nexenta investors Menlo Ventures, TransLink Capital, Javelin Ventures, Sierra Ventures, Razor’s Edge Ventures, and West Summit Capital. Its previous round, in January 2012, raised $21 million. In the process, the company also got a new CEO and CMO. It has experienced triple-digit growth for three consecutive years and reportedly has more than 5,000 users.
• Skyera, a flash startup, closed $51.6 million in second round financing led by Dell Ventures a week ago. It was founded in August, 2012.
• Pure Storage, another flash vendor, got $40 million in its fourth round of funding in August, 2012. The latest funding round was led by Mike Volpi at Index Ventures, with participation from Greylock, Redpoint, Sutter Hill, angels from VMware and DataDomain, and others, according to VentureBeat.
• Nimble Storage, a startup that provides data storage, backup, and disaster recovery, closed a $40.7 million second round of funding in September, 2012. First round investors Accel Partners, Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed, and Artis Capital participated, alongside newcomer GGV Capital. It was founded in July, 2010.

Dell’s $60 million fund, run by its investing arm Dell Ventures, was founded in July, 2012 to seed $3-$5 million in five to 10 promising startups, with Dell maintaining an equity position. This was not new to Dell; it was an early investor in VMWare and flash memory startup Fusion-io (whose chief scientist is Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak). (Skyera is also setting itself up as a competitor to Fusion-io.) This is on top of Dell itself acquiring more than two dozen storage companies.

“What’s happening in Flash memory is kind of an interesting place to start because if you think about the relationship between servers and storage and how sort of performance occurs and apps are distributed, not what we’re able to do is put large amounts of memory — we’ve actually designed this ourselves into our 12th-generation servers that we’re shipping now,” Dell told Fortune in announcing the fund. “Put several terabytes of memory directly in the server.  We acquired a little company that gives us cache coherency across a large number of servers.  And so you start to rethink what is a server, what’s storage, what’s the network when you have virtualization and now you have 50 virtual machines, 100 virtual machines, 500 virtual machines in one.  So, the storage world is really getting shaken up a tremendous amount.”

Here’s a breakdown of the issues involved.

Was the disk drive solid-state or traditional spinning disk?  There has been increasing use of solid-state drives in computers, either due to interest in improved performance or in reaction to last year’s Thai flooding, which damaged a number of hard disk manufacturing plants and made spinning disk storage more scarce and expensive.

What’s the difference? While both kinds of drive are susceptible to damage — as anyone who’s lost a drive by dropping it knows — solid-state drives are even more susceptible to damage.

“Many SSD hard drive failures are in fact unrecoverable,” writes The Inquisitor. “If the remapping tables that keep track of data in memory cells get trashed the data is effectively randomized and mixed up with data blocks which were marked as corrupted and unusable even before the SSD failed. Many SSD models also come with internal encryption that will make the lives of data forensics experts difficult.”

If it was a spinning disk, how was it damaged? For the sake of argument, though, let’s assume it’s a traditional spinning disk drive. Then the question becomes, how was it damaged? Neither reporters nor crime investigators are necessarily computer experts, and the descriptions of the damage have been vague — they don’t even specify whether Lanza had a desktop or a laptop.

Some reports indicate that Lanza removed the hard drive from the computer before damaging it, which would make it more likely that the drive itself would actually have sustained damage.

But because the platters in the hard drives that hold data are so sensitive, manufacturers tend to do what they can to protect them. Consequently, depending on how the hard drive was damaged, the platters inside could have been anything from undamaged to shattered.

How could the data be retrieved from the damaged hard drive? There are all sorts of third-party data recovery services, and chances are the FBI — which has plenty of forensics chops itself — is talking to all of them about the best way to retrieve data from whatever remains of the platters, as well as, more than likely, the manufacturer of the drive itself. Even if the platters were shattered, they could conceivably be reassembled and at least partially read.

“The level of detail they can rip out of systems these days seems incomprehensible to most people,” Rob Lee, a forensic specialist who has examined computers seized from terrorists for the U.S. intelligence community, told the Washington Post, which wrote in detail about the various ways data could be recovered. Even data from the crashed space shuttle Columbia was nearly 100% recoverable, the article noted.

Is the data available anywhere else? Even if all the data on the drive itself is irretrievable, it might be available else, ranging from a backup, to a synchronization service such as Dropbox, to obtaining copies of data and other information from sources such as Lanza’s Internet service provider, email services such as Google, or his online gaming records.

“Many e-mail providers, such as Yahoo and Google, store data on their servers for a period of time, meaning that police might be able to subpoena Lanza’s provider for access to whatever data they have,” writes the Christian Science Monitor. “Google also stores information about users’ searches and other online activity indefinitely, although it anonymizes IP addresses after 9 months, making it impossible to tell what a given user was doing online prior to that time.”

While there has been increasing concern from civil liberties organizations about the amount of information that services collect and to which law enforcement organizations have access, in this particular case, it may be our best hope in trying to make some sort of sense of this tragedy.

What it takes is enough motivation and the right equipment — and the F.B.I. has both, writes Popular Mechanics. 

Virtualization. In talking about how under-utilized data center servers are, and in appearing to limiting himself to less than state-of-the-art facilities, Glanz failed to notice how prevalent virtualization is becoming, which enables an organization to set up numerous “virtual servers” inside a physical server — which, in the process, results in much higher utilization.  ”[V]irtualized systems can be easily run at greater than 50% utilization rates, and cloud systems at greater than 70%,” writes Clive Longbottom in SearchDataCenter.

“[I]n many cases the physical “server” doesn’t even exist since everyone doing web at scale makes extensive use of virtualization, either by virtualizing at the OS level and running multiple virtual machines (in which case, yes, perhaps that one machine is bigger than a desktop, but it runs several actual server processes in it) or distributing the processing and storage at a more fine-grained level,” writes Diego Doval in his critique of the New York Times piece. “There’s no longer a 1-1 correlation between “server” and “machine,” and, increasingly, “servers” are being replaced by services.”

“Although the article mentions virtualization and the cloud as possible solutions to improve power utilization, VMware is not mentioned,” agrees Dan Woods in Forbes‘ critique of the piece. “If the reporter talked to VMware or visited their web site, he would have found massive amounts of material that documents how thousands of data centers are using virtualization to increase server utilization.”

Storage. Similarly, Glanz appeared to not be aware of advances in storage technology, even though some of them are taking place in the very data centers he lambasted in his articles. In Prineville, Ore., for example, not all that far from the Quincy, Wash., data centers he criticized, Facebook is working on designing its own storage to eliminate unnecessary parts, as well as setting up low-cost slow-access storage that is spun down most of the time.

Facebook — which does this research precisely because of the economies of scale in its massive data centers — is making similar advances in servers. Moreover, the company’s OpenCompute initiative is releasing all these advances to the computer industry in general to help it take advantage of them, too.

In addition, Glanz focused on the “spinning disks” of the storage systems, apparently not realizing that increasingly organizations like eBay are moving to solid-state “flash” storage technology that use much less power.

Also, storage just isn’t as big a deal as it used to be and as the story makes out. “A Mr Burton from EMC lets slip that the NYSE ‘produces up to 2,000 gigabytes of data per day that must be stored for years’,” reports Ian Bitterlin of Data Center Dynamics in its critique of the New York Times piece. “A big deal?  No, not really, since a 2TB (2,000 gigabytes) hard-drive costs $200 – less than a Wall Street trader spends on lunch!”

Disaster recovery. Glanz also criticized data centers for redundancy — particularly their having diesel generators on-site to deal with power failures — apparently not realizing that such redundancy is necessary to make sure the data centers stay up.

And yet, even with all this redundancy, there have been a number of well-publicized data center failures in recent months caused by events as mundane as a thunderstorm. Such outages can cost up to $200,000 per hour for a single company — and a data center such as Amazon’s can service multiple companies. If anything, one might argue that the costs of downtime require more redundancy, not less.

Of course it’s important to ensure that data centers are making efficient use of power, but it’s also important to understand the context.

This nuance came out earlier this month in connection to Intel issuing an earnings warning.

“[Intel CFO Stacy] Smith, meanwhile, said the average selling price for chips should be higher in the period as low-end PCs, which have the least expensive chips, take the biggest hit from the hard-disk drive shortages. He added that solid-state drives, which use flash memory, should see an increase in demand,” said the Wall Street Journal.

Analysts such as Oakshire Financial delved into the issue in more detail, noting that this could be an investment opportunity.

If you believe the comments of Intel’s CFO and think that solid-state drives are the future, consider the following: In addition to Intel, OCZ Technology Group (NASDAQ:OCZ) is one of the primary (read: overly hyped) makers of solid-state drives. Seagate (NASDAQ:STX), Western Digital and SanDisk all manufacture solid-state drives as well.

In fact, while hard disk drive prices have been going up, the prices of solid-state drives have been going down, notes Idealo. Moreover, regardless of the flood, solid-state drives are on track to match the price of hard disk drives in less than a year, the site notes. Previous predictions had been it would take two years for prices to equalize, the site added.