Chronological Indices

This is a list, in chronological order, of posted thoughts and presentations from industry analysts. Click on any that look interesting -- share your thoughts and comments. Note that all posts will also have links back to the original content site.
Nicolas/StorageNewsletter: With Data Domain, you invented a new way to protect data with the now ubiquitous data reduction approach. And we know the story, Data Domain got acquired by EMC in 2009 for a significant transaction. With Datrium, it’s a new story again, changing some paradigms, could you share with us the genesis of the company?
Brian Biles: Datrium combined two CTO teams - the first two CTOs from Data Domain (one of whom designed SnapVault for NetApp, deduplication at Data Domain, and was later an EMC Fellow), and two principal [...]
Each and every one of us needs to do our part to make sure that our online lives are kept safe and secure. That’s what National Cyber Security Awareness Month (NCSAM) – observed in October – is all about!  WEEK 1: October 2-6  STOP. THINK. CONNECT.™ Simple Steps to Online Safety STOP: make sure security measures are in place. THINK: about the consequences of your actions and behaviors online. CONNECT: and [...] ​
Gulp! And since the cyber connivers don’t take many days off, that’s a potential 8,030 cyberattacks per year! Websites can’t be ‘offline’ in this e-commerce / m-commerce era. Not being able to operate because your company website is out of commission burdens the SMB with measurable direct costs as detailed by Carbonite. Poke your head up, and the cyber crooks will try to cut it off. You have to get your business online to grow, but the bad guys are very good at [...]

by Tom Mumford - 2017-09-10

Throwing a Defragmentation Grenade
All SSD-enabled storage devices are fast. Real fast. But are they as fast as advertised? Not likely. Not in a live environment. But, they're probably fast enough ... or are they? ​While at a conference in Toronto several years ago, I had the opportunity to sit down with renowned storage analyst, Marc Staimer, It was great geek talk’ about emerging storage. I remember him talking about all-flash arrays (AFA) and how they were running north of 100,000 IOpS. Well north. I told him [...]

by Tom Mumford - 2017-08-30

Is Your Business Too Small to be Hacked?
​Recently, TriAxis, Inc. hosted a webinar, “Creating a Cyber-Security Culture,’ that had John Mumford and Kevin Keane weighing in on the impact of building out a secure technological infrastructure, but not having a WISP (Written Information Security Program) that includes personnel training. It was so well attended that our 100-seat webinar license was exceeded. As a result, we ran it again a week later for the additional 76 registrants. The companies​ [...]

by G. Venkitachalam & D. Wang - 2017-07-23

​What Separates The Storage Industry’s Men From Boys? Random Writes!
Every storage vendor cites read IOPS numbers, but the hard part is writes. Anyone in the storage industry knows that there are many ways to game benchmarks. But ask any engineer or SE about what’s a truly challenging workload, and they will tell you “random writes over a large address space”, especially on disk. If you have, let’s say, 120 HDDs, each with 100 IOPS, for a total of 12K IOPS. How much random write throughput [...]​

by Tom Mumford - 2017-03-14

1T2C, or One Throat to Choke
This is a follow-on/update to a blog entry from February 18, 2012. It extends the concept AND highlights a vendor of TriAxis' that, frankly, I am still surprised that there aren't more professionals familiar with them. Best kept secret and all that stuff. The vendor about whom I am referring is a Sunnyvale, CA-based firm: TERiX Computer Service. They have a compelling value proposition: eliminate all (or as many as you would like) of the various [...]

by Jim Crook - 2017-02-22

Modernizing Branch Disaster Recovery
Hope for the best and plan for the worst: useful wisdom for life and enterprise IT strategy. We’re not much for life advice here on the CTERA blog, but we are enthusiastic proponents of enterprise file services that make your organizational data accessible and secure. And an important aspect of enterprise file services is ensuring the uptime of users and offices […]

by Mark Campbell and Katie Freedman - 2017-02-17

Mistakes, Backups & Human Beings
Often when we talk about backup and continuity we focus on the dramatic. Fire. Flood. Snow. Ice. Tornadoes. Hurricanes. Meteors. And yet we don’t focus on a leading cause of needing backups – human beings. Human beings make mistakes. Backup helps us “erase” those mistakes. Human beings making mistakes; backup allowing us to go back in time prior to those mistakes happening is to me one of the singular allures in our industry. We believe that the way we make our “dent in the universe” is helping IT professionals have not just more uptime but more  […]
The #1 request I’ve been getting from customers is a white board video that succinctly explains the two silent killers of VM performance and how our I/O reduction guarantees to solve performance problems, so applications run perfectly on every Windows server. Expensive backend storage upgrades should ONLY take place when needing more capacity – not more […]
At the end of the game during Super Bowl XLIX, Seattle Seahawks’ head coach, Pete Carroll’s decision to pass over the middle was a bad call. It doesn’t matter that he was a gambler, as posed by Rob Pait in last week’s post, “Requiem For a Gambler: Why Pete Carroll Wasn’t Wrong”, it was a bad call. In case you did not see his article, […]

by Tom Mumford - 2014-12-16

Freedom to Choose -- Recurring or Upfront
Are you looking to build a recurring revenue stream based on your performance? If so, we have a service that can create that, and its corresponding lifestyle for you. One that the only limit on your commission is you and your effort. Where you’re your own boss, but not on your own. ​Or, are you looking to get paid commissions on a weekly basis? Maybe you don’t want to have to worry about the support and billing of the customer. If that [...]

by Tom Mumford - 2014-12-12

Digitally Schooled -- When Les Offers More
Digitally Schooled — When Les Offers More I posited that “D2D2C” is an acronym. It stands for “disk-to-disk-to-cloud” and would be replacing the ten-year-old version which was “D2D2T”, the “T” being for tape. I am a data storage guy and have been gravitating to more and more cloud-enabled solutions for our customers. ​From a data protection perspective, I suggested that […]

by Tom Mumford - 2014-12-09

Finished Never Is -- An Inspiring QA Maxim
Some of my team and I were at an international training conference in Phoenix last week. Being a regular to these, I knew what to expect and knew to expect the unexpected. And I wasn’t disappointed. The format was a half day followed by a full day, then another half. The quality of the speakers and trainers was excellent and the reinforcement of proven concepts was what we needed: great and expected. The mind-set piece, [...]

by Tom Mumford - 2014-12-02

D2D2C – This Acronym Has Been Served
In the data storage industry, we use acronyms the way RNs use hand sanitizers – very liberally! I remember the first one I heard that had anything to do with storage. It was in the mid- to late-‘80’s when I was employed by Structured Computer Systems (now e-Plus) which was co-founded by Marv Slayton and Jerry O’Connell. And (this is completely from memory, so excuse me if it is wrong…), it was how an [...]


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