Inside System Storage -- by Tony Pearson

Nigel Poulton over at Ruptured Monkey suggests a variety of nick names for the various storage bloggers, in his post[Storage Blogwars and the Vendor Fight Club].

Of these, fellow blogger Marc Farley suggested for me "Tony Late for Dinner Pearson", which is fair, I guess, given that I often work late to make sure my blog posts are well written, and sometimes that means I am the last to leave the building.

Full Disclosure: I've known Marc for a while now, we have attended events together and even were co-speakers on a conference call for customers.

Perhaps more disturbing is that, for the most part, the storage blogosphere is entirely dominated by men. Where are the women bloggers for storage?

technorati tags: IBM, Late For Dinner, Marc Farley, Nigel Poulton, RupturedMonkey

• A million seconds ago - you might have received your last paycheck (12 days)
• A billion seconds ago - you were born or just hired on your current job (31 years)
• A trillion seconds ago - cavemen were walking around in Asia (31,000 years)

That these numbers confuse the average person is no surprise, but that it confuses marketing people in the storage industry is even more hilarious. I am often correcting people who misunderstandMB (million bytes), GB (billion bytes) and TB (trillion bytes) of information.Take this graph as an example from a recent presentation. At first, it looks reasonable, back in 2004, black-and-white 2D X-Ray images were only 1MBin size when digitized, but by 2010 there will be fancy 4D images that now take 1TB, representinga 1000x increase. What?When I pointed out this discrepancy, the person who put this chart together didn't know what to fix.Were 4D images only 1GB in size, or was it really a 1000000x increase. If a 2D image was 1000 by 1000 pixels, each pixel was a byte of information, then a 3D imagemight either be 1000 by 1000 by 1000 [voxels], or 1000 by 1000 at 1000 frames per second (fps). Thefirst being 3D volumetric space, and the latter called 2D+time in the medical field, the rest of us just say "video".4D images are 3D+time, volumetric scans over time, so conceivably these could be quite large in size. The key point is that advances in medical equipment result in capturing more data, which canhelp provide better healthcare. This would be the place I normally plug an IBM product, like the Grid Medical Archive Solution [GMAS], a blended disk and tape storage solution designed specifically for this purpose.

So, as government agencies look to spend billions of dollars to provide millions of peoplewith proper healthcare, choosing to spend some of this money on a smarter infrastructure can result in creating thousands of jobs and save everyone a lot of money, but more importantly, save lives.

For more on this, check out Adam Christensen's blog post on[Smarter Planet], which points to a podcast byDr. Russ Robertson, chairman of the Counsel of Medical Education at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, and Dan Pelino, general manager of IBM's Healthcare and Life Sciences Industry.

technorati tags: IBM, smarter healthcare, 2D+time, 3D+time, 4D, medical images, Adam Christensen, Russ Robertson, Dan Pelino

Next week is the Spring 2009 Storage Networking World [SNW].In the category of "Innovation and Promise", there are three finalists for the "Best Practices Award": Activision Publishing, Inc., Santa Monica, California Argus Information & Advisory Systems, White Plains, New York CIGNA - Health Insurance, Windsor, Connecticut

The awards will be announced on Tuesday, April 7th at the event during the General Session:

10:00-10:15 am "Best Practices in Storage" Awards Program

Of course, I'll be rooting for the one above that used IBM's XIV disk storage system to reduce their energy consumption, improve their utilization, and simplify their management.

technorati tags: IBM, SNW, SNW2009, Innovation Promise, Best Practices, Activision, Argus, CIGNA

technorati tags: IBM, virtual tape, ibmpulse, Pulse2009, TS7650, TS7650G, ProtecTIER, deduplication