Objects of Desire

Hi y’all (just moved to Texas, trying out the new vocabulary).  Swinging through to post an update to the blog since I haven’t been around for a long while. 

Dude! Not ”those” kind of objects. 

Was at SNW last week in Dallas and had the opportunity to lead a session on object storage and describe the technology’s value from archive to cloud storage.  This is a new and emerging category in the storage industry that I believe opens new realms of possibility, not just in terms of storing stuff, but for overall information management.  There will be more to come on the subject now that I’m pretty much settled in my new gig.

The objective I’ve had with this blog is to post concepts that build upon the last and provide a context around archiving, information management and a different way of looking at things.  Things will continue in this fashion and just wanted to provide some insight into where we’ll be heading.  This is the presentation I delivered at SNW.  What’s missing is the dialog that went with it and that will be the subject of upcoming posts you’ll see here. 

Check back when you get a chance.

Checking In

My apologies for the recent sound of crickets emanating from the blog.  It’s been a while since my last post and just wanted to get a brief update on here.  Transitioned from my role as VP Marketing at Caringo for the past several years over to Dell recently and haven’t had the time to put together the next chapter in this blog.  The great thing about this change is that I get to continue driving the value of object-based storage and archive solutions, which I’ve been doing for some 13 years now.  It’s an exciting new storage technology that represents the future for preserving and ensuring availability of digital content of all kinds.  As soon as I get my feet grounded in my new role I’ll get a new post on here. 

One of the objectives of my blog is to provide a foundation for object storage and archiving to help educate folks of the benefits of the technology.  It’s an area that isn’t well understood just yet and I expect even greater traction and visibility given Dell’s new entrant, DX6000 Object Storage Platform, into this emerging segment.  I’m excited about driving product and market strategy for it and helping to build the market. 

Stay tuned…

Metadata: Key to the Kingdom

In my last post I talked about how content remains King in both the Internet realm and on intranets where it is associated mostly with unstructured or file data.  It ended by drawing a comparison between content and objects in storage based on the importance of metadata to both.  Metadata is critical because it provides the means for finding and retrieving data that may have been stored days ago or even years ago.  Whether you’re looking for a particular piece of content by browsing a folder tree (folder/sub-folder) or a group of content in a results set from a query (think Google, index/search) there’s a certain amount of metadata used for searching.  If content is King, then metadata is certainly the key to the Kingdom.

Content is [still] King!

The mantra entering the new millenium was “Content is King” and that everyone is a content producer.  That concept lost some of its luster with the burst of the dot.com bubble, but has jumped back into the spotlight and been proven that content is still King.  The penetration of broadband connectivity into the home has enabled access to rich media content of all kinds.  It’s not just content coming to the consumer, but also the consumer uploading and sharing their own content in the form of photos, videos, music, blogs, etc.

Clouds, Streams, Pools and Oceans of Information

If you’ve looked at the storage market lately to get a sense as to the climate, it’s certain you’d find it’s cloudy, with some fog and a good amount of haze.  There’s so much hype about “cloud” you’d almost think it was the turn of the century all over again (remember dot.com, SSP).  It seems everyone sees a silver lining in the cloud, or maybe a platinum lining, but certainly opportunity.  The challenge is that the concept is not well defined, much less is there a common understanding of what it is.

I’ve spent a lot of time researching and thinking about this since my current employer delivers enabling technology for the storage cloud.  The “cloud” really seems to be about ubiquitous access and connectivity to a set of networked resources (public/private), which seamlessly scale based on demand for distribution of information.  It’s not an individual product or technology, but a number of interconnected technologies that delivers a complete system.  When I ran across the Wikipedia entry that says the term cloud is a metaphor for the Internet, it got me thinking.

www.massive.con:tent/storage/repository

Example Web Map

If you think about it, the World Wide Web is simply a massive storage repository that provides ubiquitous access to content over the Internet using HTTP.  The Web browser is the primary user interface, which presents HTML pages containing hyperlinks to other HTML pages and specific content types including text, documents, images, video, etc.  The hyperlink associated with a URL (uniform resource locator), enables the user to navigate to and access another piece of content. 

Archive is a Verb

When I was briefing analysts on an archive storage product in preparation for its launch back in 2006 one of them said that they had come up with a new descriptor, “active archive” and that was the market we should be positioning in.  It was obvious they thought that this was something innovative, a new market buzz word to rally around.  Something that described greater customer value in an archive beyond just a place to put stuff, lock it down and forget about it.  My first thought: Duh.  I have been defining archive storage as “an active part” of the information infrastructure for well over a decade.

By its very nature an archive is active.  It is a living, breathing entity within an organization.  It grows, it evolves and is (or should be) a source of knowledge for future generations.

Digital Stuff

I had an altogether different idea for the follow-on to my initial blog post, but decided to go in a more entertaining direction.  We’ll explore object-based storage in an upcoming article.  This one is just for fun.

It’s often been a challenge to explain to “laymen” (folks not in the storage/tech biz) what I do.  I mean, there are a lot of people not in the industry and their experience with storage is based on the hard drive capacity of their PC.  When I talk about Petabytes, content/objects or storage clusters their eyes glaze over.  Yeah, like some of yours might have just done.  

So, when recent dinner conversation turned in this direction and a physician was asking me about my job, I took a little different tact.  The story started off by describing “digital stuff”.  You know, all that stuff one creates on their home system like e-mail, photos, audio, video, documents, graphics.  Stuff.  Digital stuff.  All this digital stuff needs to be stored somewhere.  That’s why you have a hard drive.  And when you collect too much stuff you need to get a bigger drive.  Now this was resonating with my audience.  Even the part about trying to find stuff in the big circular file cabinet, hard disk, hiding in some folder or sub-folder.

The Circular File Cabinet

No, I’m not referring to the waste basket although it is related to an important aspect of information management, which is dealing with information after it’s been produced and processed.  In the days when the bulk of information lived in hard copy form, its visibility and the amount of physical space it occupied made managing it a high priority.  As the document stacks in one’s office began to get too high, people would routinely reorganize and clean out by filing a lot of it in the circular file cabinet (waste basket).  Often it was the information that was rarely if ever used and the need for organization and space outweighed its perceived importance even though it was originally kept for a reason.

As the PC appeared on the desktop, the amount of information being kept became invisible for the most part.  The circular file cabinet became the hard disk drive, which made it easier to store more stuff without the physical clutter.  However, it has also created a problem that still needs to be resolved as it relates to knowing what’s being stored, its importance and whether it even needs to be retained.  Some would say that the disk file system has replaced the physical filing systems and made managing files easier.  However, the traditional file system is rather opaque.  It provides a static, two-dimensional view of the data on disk without any context that is needed to effectively manage information.