Size isn’t everything September 24, 2007
Posted by Drew in : Funny, Technology , add a commentSo I post about size envy and then get an immediate reminder of how transient and unimportant such things are. Here is an image showing the difference between 1Gb of storage now and 20 years ago.
This picture is great but in my new phone I have a micro-SD 2Gb card that is a fraction of the size of the Gb card. So in 20 years time how much storage?
SAN Envy
Posted by Drew in : Politics, Technology , add a commentI recently bought a SAN. I say I, it was a work based purchase. The attempt to get this piece of technology had taken quite a while. In truth an embarrassing amount of time. Ice caps had melted in the time it took us from initial sales pitches to actually signing an order. I have to hand it to the persistence of sales people that they kept alive our requirements over the 3 years that it took to get this thing bought. In the end we have a starter SAN at around 8Tb of storage. When the process started we were thinking 1Tb would be good, maybe 2 at a push if we could afford it. We now know that we have to build doubling this capacity every year and of course the solution can do this.
So there I was feeling good at finally getting this thing off the ground when the good folks at Byte and Switch ran this story about the worlds largest SANs. From the first page, “14 Petabytes of active storage and plans to add “several more Pbytes” within the next 12 months.”, OK so now I know where I stand! There are two major elements to this story that stand out to me, firstly the fact that the 14Pb is active, how the hell much archive do they/will they need and secondly this technological marvel was achieved after the owners ditched outsourcing and brought their IT back in-house where it belongs citing the fact that doing so would be far more efficient than the massive outsourcing they had previously done.
However impressive the SAN and other infrastructure is, the fact that a major corporation took the decision to bring IT back into the fold and get rid of outsourcing is even more impressive. One can only hope that more corporations and even better governments take this story to heart and dump their outsource leeches. You never know, if they do follow the example there may be a government IT project that isn’t an abject failure.
The Beer Prayer September 2, 2007
Posted by Drew in : Funny, Miscellany , add a commentI think it’s important that we all have a code to live by 
