Storagebod is better known as Martin Glassborow, an IT geek who has been playing around with computers for over 30 years; who at the age of 4 having been left alone in a university computer room proceeded to re-IPL the mainframe. He has been breaking IT infrastructure ever since. A career which has taken in banking, shipping, petrochemicals, seismic and many other industries, Martin is currently adrift in a sea of media working on building one of the largest digital media archives in Europe.
IBM storage crew: Why bury your BEST kit at the back of the larder?
Storagebod One jar of exquisite truffles hidden behind 20 different brands of baked bean
El Reg storage man Chris Mellor’s pieces on IBM’s storage revenues here and here make for some interesting reading. Things are not looking great with the exception of XIV and Storwize products. I am not sure whether Mellor’s analysis is entirely correct as it is hard to get any granularity from IBM. But his take on Big Blue …
Diagnostics tools ARE useful, but more for the vendor than me
Storagebod Some add-ons should be set free...
It never ceases to amaze me that vendors believe that they can charge an additional fee for something which makes their product work properly, as it should have done in the first place.
I believe certain products should be free and I struggle in many ways to understand why they're not.
I can’t imagine they are sold an awful lot …
Damn you, world! WHY can't I have an object store on my desktop?
Storagebod Who will rid me of these hostile cloud mutterings
Another year, another conference season sees me stuck on this side of the pond watching the press releases from afar, promising myself that I’ll watch the keynotes online - or "on demand" as people have it these days. I never find the time and have to catch up with the 140 character synopses that regularly appear on Twitter.
I …
I've got a super free multi-petabyte storage box for you: /dev/null
Storage Bod Tape archives can't grow forever, so try our solution*
As data volumes increase in all industries and the challenges of information management continue to grow, we look for places to store our hoarded bytes. Inevitably the subject of archiving and tape comes up.
It is the cheapest place to archive data by some way; my calculations give tape a four-year cost of something in the …
Corporate IT bod? Show 'em what it costs and management WILL pay
Storagebod If you don't do it, pricy outsourced crew will
Getting IT departments to start thinking like service providers is an uphill struggle; getting beyond cost-to-value seems to be a leap too far for many. I wonder if it is driven by fear of change or simply a fear of assessing value.
How do you assess the value of a service? Well, arguably, it is quite simple ... it is worth …
Flashman and the Mountain of Disk
Musings Data, data everywhere and only a tiny drop of SSD
Flash, flash and more flash seems to be the order of the day from all vendors; whether that is flash today or flash tomorrow; whether it’s half-baked, yesterday’s left-overs rehashed or an amuse-bouche; 2013 is all about the flash.
Flashman
Large and small, the vendors all have a story to tell but flash still makes up a tiny …
Storage fan seeks 'mature' cash cow for 'something more'
Storagebod blog Oh VMAX we love you...
It may come as a surprise to some people, especially reading this, but I quite like the Symmetrix (VMAX) as a platform. Sure, it's a bit long in the tooth - in marketing speak, "a mature platform". It's also a bit arcane at times - Symmetrix administrators sometimes speak a different language and use acronyms when a simple word …
EMC: No need to swallow an array - just breathe in our storage cloud
Storagebod VMAX more about pricing than tech
So EMC has finally announced the VMAX Cloud Edition: which according to this blogger is an iteration that has little to do with technology and everything to do with the way that EMC wants us to consume storage.
Firstly, let's discuss the cost model - in many ways the most important part of the announcement. EMC has now moved to …
Who'll do a Red Hat on open-source storage?
Storagebod Buy-and-build units just need a brand and a package
Are we heading for a Linux moment in the storage world where an open-source "product" truly breaks out and causes the major vendors a headache?
I’ve had this conversation a few times recently with both vendors and end users - and the general feeling is that we are pretty close to it. What is needed is for someone to do a Red Hat …
Don't be shy, vendors: Let's see those gorgeous figures
Storagebod None of that five-nines crap... your actual real-life downtime numbers
One of the frustrations when dealing with vendors is actually getting real availability figures for their kit. You will mostly get generalisations, such as "it is designed to be 99.999 per cent available" or perhaps "99.9999 per cent available". But what do those figures really mean to you and how significant are they?
Well, 99. …
Cloud doctors, DevOps and unconferences: Pass the Vicodin
Storagebod Get past annoying 'unpanel' tweeters and they're actually quite useful
At the recent London CloudCamp - "an unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas" - there was a lot of discussion about DevOps on the UnPanel. As the discussion went on, I was expecting the stage to be stormed by some of the older members in the audience. Certainly some of the tweets and the …
We trust computers to fly jets... why not trust them with our petabytes?
Storagebod blog Wait, hold on, software-defined storage ain't so crazy
Listening to The Register's latest Speaking In Tech podcast got me thinking a bit more about the craze of software-defined networking, storage and whatever next. I wondered if it is a real thing as opposed to a load of hype.
For the time being I’ve decided to treat software-defined stuff as a real thing, or at least as something …
Storage for 'Enterprise': What does that even MEAN?
Storagebod For biz, for large deployments, backup memory for the Star Trek starship?
I love it when storage vendors invent new market segments: "Entry-Level Enterprise Storage Arrays" appears to be the latest one, from the brilliant marketing team at EMC. And it is always a "new" space that only the company occupies.
But are these new spaces real segments or just marketing? Actually, the whole Enterprise Storage …
Buying a petabyte of storage for YOURSELF? First, you'll need a fridge
StorageBod Plus a few hundred thousand quid, a reinforced floor...
A good friend of mine recently got in contact to ask my professional opinion on something for a book he was writing. He asked me how much a petabyte of storage would cost today and whether I thought it would affordable for an individual. Both parts of the question are interesting in their own way.
How much would a petabyte of …
2013 in storage: Flash, file systems and... Is CDMI actually HAPPENING?
Storagebod Plus - Storage arrays: The Next Generation
There are a lot of things bubbling away in the storage pot at the moment and it appears to be almost ready to serve. Acquisitions are adding ingredients and we should see quite a few in early 2013 as well as firms snap up tech to flesh out the next generation of storage arrays.
Yes, we will see some more tick-tock refreshes; …
Is EMC really jealous of these nubile storage upstarts?
Storagebod Something's rattled the tech giant's data centre cage
It's kinda heartwarming to see an EMC veep publicly accuse a storage journo of misquoting him on XtremIO - but only because it feels like the spats of days gone by are back.
It doesn't matter if it's about network-attached storage or flash; switch around the jargon and you’ll probably find the same blog entries work and the same …
Yo, storage geeks: Fancy a bit of scale-out fun time?
Storagebod Xmas comes early... for me at least
Recently I’ve been playing with a new virtual appliance; well new to me in that I’ve only just got my hands on it. It’s one of the many that our friends in EMC have built and it is one which could do with a wider audience.
A few years ago Chad Sakac managed to make the Celerra virtual appliance available to one and all, and a …
Flash is dead ... but where are the tiers?
Storagebod Storage tiering needs to be separate from arrays
Flash is dead: it's an interim technology with no future. But yet it continues to be a hot topic and technology. I suppose I ought to qualify that. Flash will be dead in the next five to 10 years and I’m talking about the use of flash in the data centre.
Flash is the most significant improvement in storage performance since the …
Software sucks these days - and just maybe it's all YOUR fault
StorageBod Blog Say NO to beta-grade stuff
Every now and then, I write a blog article that could probably get me sued, sacked or both; this started off as one of those, and has been heavily edited by myself to avoid naming names.
Software quality sucks. The "release early, release often" model appears to have permeated into every level of the IT stack; from the buggy …
Hey, start-ups: Why do you only cater to storage SIZE QUEENS?
StorageBod Blog We shouldn't assume that object-stores should be large
One of the most impressive demonstrations I saw at SNW Europe was from the guys at Amplidata. On their stand, they had a tiny implementation of Amplistor with the back-end storage being USB memory sticks. This enabled a quick and effective demonstration of their erasure encoding protect and the different protection levels on …
