Adversity creates opportunity.  Will the Cloud be able to exploit it?

Adversity changes things.  My dad often told me “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”  In Technology, things are constantly changing already. But adversity can accelerate change or even incite a disruptive seachange to a new business model. 

IDC thinks this is happening now with online storage.

Businesses that have been reluctant to put their precious data in the Cloud are now being economically compelled to do so.  They’ll hold their breath and jump…and likely find that their fears were largely unfounded. 

Those of you in the Cloud business: get ready!  You’re going to get a chance to break out with a broader set of Pragmatists and even Late Adopters that wouldn’t normally knock on your door.

With this crowd, you’ll only get one chance to make a first impression.

Get your storage on in 11 colors - straight from Seagate

The new Seagate FreeAgent Go from Seagate has been widely available in four colors. 

Now Seagate has expanded the patette to 11 colors - available exclusively on Seagate’s website.

Not a revolutionary thing, but a big step for Seagate.  Consumers want choice and convenience, no matter how technical the product’s innards.  

Storage can be fun!

Counter-cyclical trends boost “value” storage companies now and later

My buddy in Sales is seeing an interesting trend.  Some second-Tier storage vendors are doing relatively well right now, as long as some amount of credit remains available for them.  Sales are holding steady, even increasing.

Why is that?  Their customers don’t have money to spend of course, but their data continues to grow.  They have to do something, so they’re foregoing expensive and service-contract-laden storage from the top Acronym vendors for cheaper storage systems that get them over the hump.

It makes sense if you think about it.  McDonald’s is reaping a minor windfall right now from diners foregoing sit-down restaurants.  People have to eat somewhere.

This could become more than a cyclical setback for the Big Guys if customers develop a taste for storage fast food.

It takes care of data so time-strapped staff don’t have to

Seagate introduced the Maxtor CentralAxis Business Edition, network storage for small businesses.  Like its little brother for the home, CentralAxis BE is a game changer. 

Unlike traditional storage solutions that are add-on afterthoughts and don’t always work well together, CentralAxis BE puts the content first.  It’s a single central storage solution that makes managing the changing demands for storage simpler and safer as a business grows:

• Easy to install and manage with a compact design and anywhere access.  Staff can access and share data from anywhere via the web.
• One system for the entire company with up to 2 terabytes of space.  One system works for all employees across Windows and Mac OSes.
• Safety for all a company’s data with automatic backups for up to 20 PCs that save up to ten historical versions of information.  Backups are mirrored across two drives for added safety. Plug an external drive into a USB port for rotating backups offsite.

Need more space?  Add another CentralAxis BE. 

At some point you’ll probably need a more complicated solution.  You can put your IT department on that task…once your big enough to hire one.

Solving the “data on the loose” problem starts with safer loose data

Despite an almost daily cadence of news stories about exposed customer data, most IT departments seem resigned to the fact that their number might be called.  It’s just fate, right?  What are they supposed to do - ban thumb drives?  Restrict notebook PCs to the office?

New products from Dell, Seagate and others are finally providing realistic solutions.  For a small premium to standard notebooks and mobile storage devices, companies can now make their employees data loss-proof with self-encrypted disk drive technology like Seagate’s Seagate Secure. 

Blesssed by the NSA

These notebooks and portable drives can still be lost or stolen, but the data is 100% protected with government-grade 128-bit AES encryption.  The incident remains an inconvenient hassle rather than a newspaper headline. 

Even the NSA has given this technology a thumbs-up. 

Unlike software solutions, the disk drives in these products are encrypted automatically so employees can’t turn it off or forget to turn it on. There is no performance penalty.  Laptop passwords can be centrally managed with McAfee’s ePolicy Orchestrator and other vendors’ products.

While mobile encryption doesn’t plug every hole in your defenses (malicious or misguided workers, for instance), it does provide a foundation of security that you can build upon.

Let’s hear from users (or panners) of this technology - what do you think?

SSDs will be an almost ideal addition to enterprise storage systems. Notebooks? Not so much.

1. Many drives vs. one drive.   SSDs replace multiple disk drives in high-end enterprise systems.  Notebooks use SSDs as a one-for-one replacement, which wastes most of the game-changing advantages of flash.

2. Servers need speed, notebooks need capacity.  Servers can use SSD’s blazing performance without requiring much capacity.  SSD performance matters little to a notebook, but hundreds of gigabytes are needed per drive.  SSDs biggest weakness is cost per gigabyte.

3. SSD power consumption matters more to the enterprise.  Notebooks care about power, but the drive’s share of a notebook’s power draw doesn’t make that much difference in battery life.  High-end enterprise systems have a heat problem from multiple drives in a small space that SSD will help to alleviate.

4. Notebooks don’t leverage SSD speed. A notebook’s boot time and performance depend on many factors beyond access time.  High-end systems use many drives striped in parallel to maximize performance - a perfect opportunity for a much faster device.

Even in Enterprise, the devil is in the details

So let’s go, right? Not so fast, cowboy! One way SSD is less suited for the data center than notebooks is in durability.  Unlike notebooks, high-end systems work storage devices like dogs.  SSDs are improving, but today’s products can wear out before their time.  Losing data in a notebook doesn’t compare with losing it in a high-end business application.  And standards are a bigger deal in the data center.

Ready-for-prime-time versions will be available starting in 2009.  In the meantime, it’s smart to start playing with the technology now so you’re ready to implement in volume next year. 

Buy a fancy SSD notebook, too, if you’re a Techie or want to act like one.  If not, it’s probably a waste of your money. 

McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator adds self-encrypting PC drives to its bag of security tricks

There’s a security industry axiom that says “It’s better to place the guard next to the jewels.”  With McAfeee’s latest move, it looks like the information security industry is taking that to heart by bringing self-encrypting disk drives (SED) into the mainstream mix of security infrastructure elements.

Unlike software-based encryption, SED drives like Seagate’s Momentus FDE drives encrypt everything written to a drive, at the drive.  This takes away potential ‘back doors’ or access points to PC data and encrypts at full speed.  It makes encryption hackproof and “free” from a performance and individual PC management standpoint.

What’s been lacking are the hooks in some enterprise management tools like McAfee’s ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) that simplify management of self-encrypting PCs.  Wave Systems, SECUDE International and others already support Momentus SED.

McAfee’s announcement makes SED an easy-to-add security tool for a much broader market.  Expect rapid growth in SED as more companies place more guards next to their digital crown jewels.

For me it’s 1.2 terabytes

In previous posts I’ve added up the storage in my home office and my living room.  Now it’s time to go to work:

• Laptop: 100 GB
• Local backup drive: 500 GB
• Remote backup drive: 320 GB
• Personal storage: 250 GB
• Video camera: 40 GB
• BlackBerry: 64 MB
• TOTAL: 1.2 terabytes

My first blog post a year ago was about my full drive on my work PC.  Since then I’ve expanded to 100 gigabytes.  Nothing like my home PC, but work space requirements tend to be lower.

I’m in the midst of changing my backup method from a local desktop backup drive to a BlackArmor portable drive.  It allows me to backup my work remotely.  It’s got Seagate Secure technology, which means it’s hackproof - no worries about losing sensitive information.

I expect my next laptop to have a Seagate Secure encrypted drive inside as well. 

Someday it will be considered stupid - and maybe illegal - to use a hard drive that’s not self-encrypting in a business PC.

SSD sounds great, but the reality doesn’t match the dream

Solid State Technology talked to Seagate and Fujitsu SSD leaders and came to the same conclusions posted here before - SSDs for notebooks may sound like a great match, but it’s just not happening. 

Why? Price - big difference!  Boot time and battery life - little to no difference. 

Yes, there are small opportunities for ultra-high end early adopters and ultra-portable mini-PCs.  But the total opportunity for SSDs over the next several years will be miniscule compared to disk drives.

Enterprise is a larger and more profitable niche for SSDs - but even there the opportunity is at the tip of the storage iceberg that will remain dominated by disk.

Any SSD users out there that disagree?

Seagate’s CEO Bill Watkins and Marketing SVP Pat King on the Wild West of storage

Chris Meilor listened in as Seagate CEO Bill Watkins and Marketing SVP Pat King talked about Seagate’s plans for home NAS, SSD, hybrid storage and more at a recent press event.  It’s a good read - check it out here.

Chris refers to the consumer storage market as the Wild West, but that moniker could easily be used to describe the storage market in general.  Dramatic change is underway across the spectrum, from the largest corporations overwhelmed with petabyte growth and data on the loose to the Dawning of the Digital Consumer. 

The storage industry is exciting (and always has been) for those who work in it.  It’s becoming more relevant and entertaining to those outside of the industry as content and its storage matter like never before.