Silicon Geyser: put your datacentres here
Is Iceland destined to be the new Silicon Valley? Or maybe Silicon Geyser might be more appropriate.
What's going on in networking, operating systems, servers, storage and data centres?
Editor, journalist, analyst, presenter and blogger. As well as blogging and writing news & features here on ZDNet, I work as a cloud analyst with STL Partners, and write for a number of other news and feature sites. I also provide research and analysis services, video and audio production, white papers, event photography, voiceovers, event moderation, you name it... Back story An IT journalist for 25+ years, I worked for Ziff-Davis UK for almost 10 years on PC Magazine, reaching editor-in-chief. Before that, I worked for a number of other business & technology publications and was published in national and international titles.
Is Iceland destined to be the new Silicon Valley? Or maybe Silicon Geyser might be more appropriate.
I may have mentioned here before that I believe object storage is likely to become more popular, and here's why.Standard file systems tend to slow down the more files they have to manage due to the need to traverse the tree structure, which can be very deep for service providers managing data from multiple customers.
Server makers could be in trouble -- piling more woe onto HP's plate, perhaps, a company that underwent a firestorm of negative publicity following its recent dismissal of a CEO after just 11 months in office. But I'm not about to pour more fuel onto that fire.
If you're involved in managing storage in a datacentre, then you know that managing it is not always the easiest task. Trouble is, there's lots of companies out there now that promise to fix the problem.
Datacentres are powering down. This may sound a bit odd given that world + dog seem to be opening new facilities every other week -- though bear in mind that we rarely hear about old, outdated facilities being mothballed or re-purposed.
There's a lot going for tape. Apart from the conditioned rooms it's advisable to keep them in, and the need to refresh them every couple of years, and to carefully manage the encryption keys that you used to protect the data on them....
Solid state storage is expensive, rotating media storage is cheap. Thus runs the first law of storage these days but one company claims that it's changed all that and if true, we could be at an inflection point.
When it comes to pushing storage packets around the datacentre, there's one protocol that's king: Fibre Channel (FC -- and they even spell it properly). But everyone is predicting that FC will eventually wither away, for a number of reasons.
Cloud computing means that you don't care about where the data is stored, and that your data is secure. Never mind that some contracts might suggest that your data is backed up when it fact it isn't, at least it's being run by people who know what they're doing, and you don't have to go through the hassle of employing them.
Things are hotting up in the datacentre. Not just as a result of increasing moves towards a warmer operating temperature, but also due to some of the commercial activity around the new dynamic datacentre.