GE still pushing holographic storage

Apparently, the GE product is designed for backwards compatibility with Blu-ray and DVD, keeping the drive cost lower and data rates faster than InPhase.  Details in the article below.

GE tries to refocus image of holographic storage • The Register

Currently holographic storage products inhabit a graveyard or deep freeze. InPhase is currently seemingly in hibernation – not dead but showing little sign of life – though with a late 2009 ship date coming for its troubled $18,000 Tapestry drive and $180 per CD-size disks. UDO developer Plasmon is dead and gone, with a slight phoenix possibility in the shape of its asset purchaser, AST.

A very nice Scala tutorial for Java programmers.

This is the best introduction to Scala I’ve seen so far for the Java programmer.  I’d classify it as “best” because it is short and cuts right to the chase.   The example used is complex enough to reveal enough of the underlying language elements to be worthwhile, but simple enough to allow you to concentrate on the language and not the problem being implemented.   Nice job.

Is Scala really more complicated than Java?

After a conversation with a guy at work, I was inspired to take a look at whether Scala is inherently more complex than Java, and decided it wasn’t.

The End of RAID

This is a very good article that explains why RAID arrays are about to become obsolete.  I might have liked a few graphs that project when an EMC CX4 would no longer be a viable Enterprise storage option, but overall this article is a gem.   If you work in data management, now is the time to start worrying.

RAID’s Days May Be Numbered – www.enterprisestorageforum.com

The bottom line is this: Disk density has increased far more than performance and hard error rates haven’t changed much, creating much greater RAID rebuild times and a much higher risk of data loss. In short, it’s a scenario that will eventually require a solution, if not a whole new way of storing and protecting data.

Security for data on your laptop

In order to keep your data safe from customs, you may have to take one step closer to losing it forever, yourself.  But in the end, the worst outcome is that no one will have your data.  Unless they water-board you.

Protect Your Laptop Data From Everyone, Even Yourself

There’s another solution, one that works with whole-disk encryption products like PGP Disk (I’m on PGP’s advisory board), TrueCrypt, and BitLocker: Encrypt the data to a key you don’t know.

Five-Dimensional DVD stores 1 TB per sq cm.

A new Australian technique that utilizes multiple wavelengths and polarizations to interact with gold nano-particles rather than polymers.  The exact capacity is is never given in the article but it sounds like they are suggesting a DVD sized disc that can hold 50 TB.

Technology Review: Five-Dimensional Data Storage

A new light-responsive material could lead to discs the size of today’s DVDs that store four orders of magnitude more data. Traditional DVDs and CDs store data on their surface in two dimensions, and holographic discs can store it in three.

DoJ accuses EMC of kickbacks, overcharging

This is a pretty interesting case.  Not just because I feel overcharged, either.  It sounds like the federal government is going after the Channel.  It seems the feds have reached the conclusion that if a value added reseller (consultant or system integrator) adds no real value but simply promotes the product paying the highest “alliance benefits” – then that amounts to taking a kickback. 

You know … as if a record label were to pay a DJ (remember those?) money for extra spins of song that wasn’t really that good (like that one by Britney Spears) just so they could make more sales. 

So is the Channel just one big lump of payola? 

DOJ allegations against EMC focus on kickbacks, overcharges

The U.S. Justice Department believes that EMC Corp. gave kickbacks to federal IT consultants and overpriced hardware, software and technology services it sold to the government beginning in the late 1990s….

The government’s complaint asserts that these alliance relationships
and the resulting alliance benefits paid by EMC amount to kickbacks and
undisclosed conflict of interest relationships,

InPhase: This time – for sure!

Been waiting for this product to arrive for so long, now, that we’re calling it Godot.  The only bright spot for InPhase launching its new, untested kit in the middle of the second great depression is that its only serious rival, Plasmon, has already succumbed.

InPhase might ship holographic storage this year? • The Register

InPhase Technologies CEO Nelson Diaz has broken his silence over the company’s much-delayed holographic drive saying it would ship later this year.

There had been fears that Longmont, Colorado-based InPhase could sink without trace because of the recession as it has been plagued with delay after delay in the development and bringing to production of its 300GB Tapestry drive.

AncientFS for Macs

Dust off those 9 track tape backups of your old Larn adventures.

AncientFS Brings Ancient File Systems to the Mac

AncientFS is a file system for MacFUSE that will mount all sorts of ancient file systems in the form of data containers as regular volumes on Mac OS X. “Examples of ‘data containers’ include file system disk images, tape images, incremental file system dumps, tape archives, and library archives.” You may then browse these volumes through the Finder as if they were regular volumes. They are read-only, and will preserve as many aspects of the original file system as possible.

In addition, Singh also introduced support for file systems in the System V and UFS families

Sizing Up Fibre Channel over Ethernet

It used to look like Fibre Channel over ethernet (FCoE) was the red-headed stepchild of the storage networking zoo.  It sort of seemed like a mix of the worst parts of iSCSi and Fibre Channel.  But this article paints the technology as a glass-half-full, instead  Well worth the read.

iSCSI: Game over • The Register

FCoE levels the block-level access playing field. There’s no longer the marketing distinction between a Fibre Channel array – fast, costs more – and an iSCSI array – slower, less reliable access, cheaper. It’s all Fibre Channel. The distinction will move to the media inside the array and the array software. So all iSCSI array vendors will need to rethink their marketing propositions and retool their product strategies.

The Chinese want Seagate

The article doesn’t say why the Chinese did not make a play for Western Digital

Chinese Seek to Buy a U.S. Maker of Disk Drives – New York Times

The overture, which was disclosed by the chief executive of one of the two remaining drive makers in the United States, William D. Watkins of Seagate Technology, has resurrected the issues of economic competitiveness and national security raised three years ago when Lenovo, a Chinese computer maker, bought I.B.M.’s personal computer business.