Author Archives: steven

Doing customer research

Over the last several weeks we have been talking to customers about what they like and dislike about their storage providers. Listening to the stories of what they are told by their OEM salesman and engineers and comparing that to … Continue reading

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A cloudy definition

A lot of the trade press is talking about cloud computing and even the Economist has gotten the bug. That surprised me because the cloud is a fairly technical concept. “Granted, there are hundreds if not thousands of firms offering … Continue reading

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Super Computer show in Portland

A lot of our customers and friends will be at the SC09 show in Portland this year. I have been invited to the show, and will be working with a few of our customers on how to mange and reduce … Continue reading

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Interesting article

ESJ has an interesting article that I suggest folks looking into cloud computing read. The author, Henry Newman, lays out quite a few issues with bandwidth and recovery time using a cloud storage provider. An excerpt: The bandwidth problem isn’t … Continue reading

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Software licensing

I thought this was an interesting article – By Nicole Kobie, 5 Oct 2009 at 12:28Confused man with his head in his hands Microsoft knows its licensing is a problem, but don’t expect it to get any simpler anytime soon, … Continue reading

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Unemployment & Storage Budgets

Today’s news confirmed what I heard during my recent trip across the country visiting with our customers. Budgets are tight, and investment in hardware and human resources is going to be slowed by the uncertainty of what the costs of … Continue reading

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Storage is a commodity,service is not

A friend of mine wrote me the following “Storage is the last bastion of high margins for IT vendors that make proprietary products. Ethernet, fiber channel, wireless and even operating systems have become commodity products. Storage is a commodity and … Continue reading

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Another long trip

I have been traveling around the USA visiting customers for the last two weeks. It has been a long trip and I have heard from a lot of large storage customers that budgets remain constricted. Adding storage capacity that is … Continue reading

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Scalability, Predictability, Affordability, Reliability

My goodness the guys at Backblaze have gotten people talking about storage value. This morning I heard from one customer of ours who likes the BackBlaze price points who asked if we could provide an enterprise service and support model … Continue reading

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An affordable archive

Did you ever notice that there is an inverse relationship between data archiving budgets and data archiving growth. Data that is accessed once on a blue moon is expensive to store on spinning media, and it is hard to keep … Continue reading

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