What a long, strange trip it’s been for storage recently. First, there was the disaster that turned out to be less of a disaster than we thought. All those Paris Hilton phone numbers and Perez Hilton black book emails lost to a Sidekick in the ribs … But then it turned out all was not lost — in fact, most data was found, wagging their tails behind them.
Many in the industry have been howling about how unfair it was that the entire cloud took such a massive hit in light of the Sidekick meltdown. But then the skies cleared, and in his Enterprise Storage Strategies blog, Stephen Foskett came out with a surprising argument. All the more so as he works in the very industry that has been so massively hammered by the whole Danger/Sidekick/MS/EMC/HDS/cloud/whoever-else-we-can-blame disaster.
He writes: “Although my professional focus is at the forefront of the cloud storage wave, I can not disagree with the content of articles with sensational headlines like “Cloud Storage: It’s Strictly For Airheads” and “Why Cloud Storage Use Could Be Limited in Enterprises“. The authors are doing exactly what everyone should be doing: Questioning the viability and suitability of cloud storage in the enterprise.”
I agree, and would add that this should be the case when considering other solutions, including, yes, data reduction. In fact, our recent post on dedupe misconceptions has gotten all manner of attention recently for its even-handed response to alarmism about the necessity for dedupe for primary. It garnered a quick mention in Simon Sharwood‘s roundup of storage blog-o-tweet-osphere smackdowns on SearchStorage. And there is plenty more to say about this–so much in fact that it doesn’t fit into this small space.
Not to worry, because over at his new Isilon blog, Nick Kirsch is asking for input on deduplication for primary, nearline and backups. Is it here to stay, or a craze? He asks. A good question, and one that might be answered with another question, “how fast is unstructured data growing?”
Finally, Online Storage Optimization hit the big time this week, getting a mention in the Forbes Velocity blog. Staffer Brian Caulfield, in search of a way to promote his new blog, called upon our wisdom of booth babes.
Happy weekend to you all.
Bo Peep Image: http://www.teachersandfamilies.com/nursery/bopeep.html
