December

In the northern hemisphere, December is a month without lots of daylight - so a great time to read and learn about light: twisted light, that is!

As Hu Yoshida writes in his blog:
"...a group of British and Chinese researchers have developed a microchip that is capable of emitting photons with a property known as orbital or angular momentum. Each wavelength can carry an infinite number of values of orbital angular momentum, so this ”twisted” light could dramatically increase data transfer rates over optical fiber communications links. Researchers have already sent data at speeds of up to 2.5 terabits per second."
Read the details here.

Then, as always an indication where the market is heading, Brocade and NetApp have recently issued their quarterly numbers.
Overall 3Q industry numbers will be out in the next couple days I presume and I will certainly post them here!

And lastly, the industry has started to ship the next generation LTO: LTO-6 provides 2.5 TB native capacity (6.25 TB compressed) and 160 MB/s data rate!
Nicely keeping up with the very first 4 TB HDDs hitting the market!

November II

Yes, tape.

This is probably the first time the mother of all IBM home pages www.ibm.com shows tape - since we invented it in 1952! Check it out while it's out there!

November

We had some very early snow here in Switzerland in the past days, but thankfully it's melting away now and we are looking forward to some more warm and colorful days of Fall!

Today's topics are a very mixed bag as usual:

• More on Windows Storage Spaces and an interesting acquisition of Microsoft in the storage industry this last month!
• Two more articles in the steady stream of news related to PCM (phase-change memory): One by our friends at searchstorage, and an interview with IBM Zurich Research member Harris Pozidis.
• One brilliant article about the sad situation of HP storage.
• Final proof that Amazon's Glacier cloud uses tape! I knew it! (see my September post below)

Related to the recent trend to "Integrated Systems" like IBM's PureSystems (and no, Pure Storage is not an IBM brand (yet)!):
here's a nice comparison by Hu Yoshida with the old days of "Hi-Fi" gear and how we used to combine and assemble best of breed components with the goal of the ultimate music experience in mind!

And lastly: Very unusual approaches to high capacity and long-term archiving and data storage:

In a kind of revival of optical storage, Hitachi proposes a glass-based storage solution to store data for millions of years while WD (Western Digital) thinks about helium-filled HDDs to boost capacity.

Will they require heavy racks to prevent them from flying away?