Tuesday, November 8, 2011

November


October is missing in my posts - I just realize. It has been a very busy time, but fortunately also including some days off with my family!

So it's time to catch up on some recent developments in the storage industry... or should I say cloud industry? The picture here (taken in Lisbon) kind of reminds me of the cloud value proposition: only have parts of the building and use the cloud as the "roof"?!

Having said that: how would you like unlimited cloud storage for 10$ a month? Well, there's a company offering just this. They claim that by deduplicating and compressing data, they are able to offer such an attractive price.

One of the major "events" in October was sadly the passing of Steve Jobs who leaves a big void at Apple (I'm convinced!). One of his quotes back from 1993 especially struck me:
"Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me." [The Wall Street Journal, May 25, 1993]"
In his very special way, he has probably achieved both things in his life! (there's a couple other quotes from him here).

And then - in one way or another kind of related to Steve and his company - here's a couple other interesting articles:
A short history of social media
do you remember Geocities or Friendster?
A project to make available the archives of the Montreux Jazz Festival
1.2PB of storage will hold 40 years of performances at the Festival!
The Ten Commandements of the American Religion
and Rule #1 is: Own a Home!
147 companies own everything
Three systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ) have taken a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide and analyzed all 43,060 transnational corporations and share ownerships linking them.

In another indication of the heavy market dominance of VMware in the hypervisor market, they now think about introducing a new concept and way to provision storage to VM hosts: getting away with LUNs and /or NFS and introducing what they call "storage containers". Even if this new concept will never hit the market, I am personally convinced that whoever offers the best integration with VMware will be succesful in that storage segment in the future!

And lastly, one comment about FcoE ("why FCoE is dead but not burried yet") and a 55th Birthday! RAMAC was introduced some 55 years ago, the first "hard disk drive" as we know it.