The Distinction Between Data Backup and Business Continuity by Brandon Garcin Believe it or not, the first data backups were made on paper. Dating back as early as the 18th century, the "technology" was used in the form of paper tapes constructed from punch cards to control the functions of automated machinery such as textile looms. The concept of these cards was then further developed by IBM in the early days of data processing, where data input, storage and commands were captured using a series of hole punches. In 1956, IBM introduced the 350 disk storage unit - the first ever hard disk drive. It was 60 inches in length, stood nearly 70 inches tall and had a capacity of 5 million 6-bit characters - or 3.75 MB of data. And although less than 4 megabytes may not seem like much (a decent cell phone can today take a picture with a larger file size), the 350 unit represe... (more)

Latency Beyond Throughput | @CloudExpo #DataCenter #Storage #SSD #SCM

Storage is moving to flash, and flash is getting faster, so people keep asking me why I keep talking about latency as if there is a problem.  Isn't faster flash going to just make everything faster?  Won't "the rising tide lift all boats"? Flash media as a storage media is indeed "faster" than the spinning hard-disks we've all been using for decades.  But when it is used to simulate a hard disk, as is the case with SSD products, there are software layers which prevent it from reaching its full potential.  That explanation always gets heads nodding, because it is obvious.  But wh... (more)

Monitoring DNS Load Balancers | @DevOpsSummit @Catchpoint #DevOps #WebPerf

If your website receives heavy traffic and you are hosted across multiple infrastructures across the world or you are using multiple CDNs, then you ought to use a DNS Load Balancer to reroute traffic for better performance. While there are some large companies who create their own DNS load balancing system, which is complex and tedious to implement and manage, some companies make life easier by opting for ready-made solutions such as those from Cedexis, Dyn, NSONE, Rage4, etc. Most of the above mentioned companies are backed by Anycast networks spread across global locations. Wh... (more)

The Future of Network Appliances | @CloudExpo #Cloud #NFV #IoT #SDN

We live in a hyper-connected, mobility-enabled world, one in which carriers must make drastic changes to how they do business if they are to survive and thrive in the future. Accordingly, great strides have been made over the last three years to prove the viability of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). Many Proof of Concept (PoC) trials have proven that workloads can be migrated to virtual environments running on standard hardware, and there are even examples of carrier deployments using NFV. The next step is to determine how to make NFV work effectively so it will deliver ... (more)

Andi Mann @DevOpsSummit Chair | @AndiMann #DevOps #Microservices

Cloud Expo, Inc. has announced today that Andi Mann returns to DevOps Summit 2015 as Conference Chair The @DevOpsSummit at  Cloud Expo, will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. "DevOps is set to be one of the most profound disruptions to hit IT in decades," said Andi Mann. "It is a natural extension of cloud computing, and I have seen both firsthand and in independent research the fantastic results DevOps delivers. So I am excited to help the great team at @DevOpsSummit and Cloud Expo tell the world how they can leverage this emerging d... (more)

Who Will Be Storage Leaders of 2016? | @CloudExpo #Cloud #SDN #Linux

A year ago, I wrote a two-part series on how lower cost, higher performance on-premise storage and nearly free cloud-based storage were driving both innovation and disruption in the storage industry.  Applying Clayton Christensen's theory of innovation and disruption to the storage industry, my premise was that flashy startups, (e.g., Pure, Nimble, VMem, Tegile and Tintri) that were first to introduce credible data reduction to flash arrays were innovators but not disruptors in the space and would therefore disappoint investors; storage incumbents (e.g., HDS, EMC and IBM) who add... (more)