NAS just works, doesn’t it? Well no, not always. We’ve just come across a bizarre bug in OnTap 7.3.2 with CIFS running a Mac. If you rename a file and whilst doing so, change case; the file disappears.

Two very different press conferences/product launches happened today, and both had a very common theme: control.

If you don’t cluster your arrays, how do you protect against the failure of a RAID rank? Statistically unlikely but it is it more or less unlikely than a loss of data-centre? I’m not sure and the failure of a RAID rank for many people could well mean the invocation of the disaster recovery plan. Why?

Did VMWare save EMC? Did EMC need saving? At the point it bought VMWare probably not but if EMC had not bought VMWare, I suspect it would have been in dire straights or at least not the company it is today. I’d go as far as to propose that it would have been bought itself by now.

Availability figures lull people into a false sense of security as actually no-one knows what they mean!

A lot of posts and talks from people involved in VMware and especially when we start talking about the Private Cloud talk about 100% virtualised data centres. And there’s always the nay-sayers like me who point out that there are niche applications which currently can’t be virtualised. These include applications which run specialist hardware and applications which have real-time requirements; in my world of Broadcast Media, these are often one and the same.

I’ve been thinking about FAST and especially FAST v2 but not entirely from a storage point of view. FAST v2 and indeed any automated storage tiering product has some interesting uses beyond storage and could be a basis for a whole new way of managing IT as a service. In fact, it finally enables storage and beyond to managed as a service. BTW I’m going to use FAST as shorthand for any automated storage product; so please don’t take this as only being about EMC.

Chad Sakac recently tweeted about some issues EMC were having with VMware and there was a predictable and rather pathetic dig from NetApp about perhaps this being a result of EMC having too many product lines and having too much to QC.

One of the things you get used to as a consumer of services is that at times changes to the terms and conditions of that service irritate you and you consider moving your custom. Most of the time you don’t and eventually you learn to live with the changes. Actually, most of the times, the changes don’t make a jot of difference and you are just irritated for the sake of being irritated.

Before we all get carried away and pick on Cloud Storage as a specific target; perhaps we should sit back and think. It is not Cloud Storage; it is the Public Cloud which is the problem; the most visible failures have been storage related, but let’s be honest; without storage, you don’t have a Cloud Environment.