Storage in high places

Two press releases caught my eye this week that aren’t exactly earth-shattering, but got me thinking about the way the storage market is changing and widening.

First, SanDisk revealed that its flash cards are recording footage of an excursion to Everest by a three-member climbing team sponsored by Dell, Windows Vista, MSN and MSNBC. Here’s a media gallery of the chilly-looking expedition so far.

Then there was also an announcement from RAID, Inc. of its compact Razor RAID array using 2.5-inch SAS drives, billed as “ideal for small spaces such as cockpits, tanks, submarines and other civilian applications with specific space constraints.” The ‘cockpits’ idea got my imagination going.

Between flash memory, with fewer moving parts and power requirements, and small-form-factor hard disks, not to mention the continued increase in content we store digitally, enterprise-level data storage is worming its way into unheard-of environments. As such, many in the industry have been predicting an increasing focus on edge devices, mobile computing environments and the mobile workforce for the storage market. Hopefully enterprise storage managers are paying attention to these new frontiers while architecting storage at headquarters.

Also, since it’s Friday, and who couldn’t use a laugh? Check out this priceless Gizmodo post on an internal Microsoft sales video that recently made its awkward YouTube debut. Key line: “You’ve gotta wonder how, in a company the size of Microsoft, there’s not a single person who [can] step up and say “Hey, you know what? This Vista music video we’re making for the sales department, complete with a cheesy Bruce Springsteen impersonator and horrible music, damages the dignity of not only everyone involved in its production, but everyone who watches it.”