Posts by Steve Todd

When EMC bought the mid-range CLARiiON storage system in 1999, there were two main reasons: (a) It was fast (mirrored write cache), and (b) it was rock-solid reliable (RAID5 algorithms).…

At lunch during VMworld this week I had the opportunity to sit in on a CTO Roundtable kicked off by EMC CTO John Roese. The lunch was attended by a…

Over the past several weeks I've been taking a historical look at the evolution of backup and recovery software.  The discussions I've been having with Stephen Manley and Mark Twomey…

This week at VMworld I've been focused on getting a first-hand view of the integration of key EMC assets into the VMware framework. Two of the better use cases I've…

One of the problems with application workload evolution is infrastructure agility when deploying new storage paradigms. How can a customer quickly add new capability (e.g. object-based storage, HDFS) without waiting…

In a recent post I introduced the concept of infrastructure-based metadata and hybrid applications. Both of these areas represent the result of a new type of application workload in data…

In a recent post I introduced the concept of "infrastructure-based metadata". In a data center, this type of metadata falls into four categories: Metadata about configuration management of the infrastructure.…

In my last post I described how a new form of application workload began gaining steam last decade: infrastructure-based applications. The complexity of these applications caused a tremendous surge of…

In previous posts I have described how application workloads drove innovation in the areas of block (SAN), file (NAS), and object(CAS) storage systems.  I discussed the evolution of these systems…

I started writing about application workloads and innovation by using a simple diagram: Applications want to store and retrieve data. In the pre-disk array era, the binding between an application…