Like many many proud parents I am sure the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will treasure their first picture of their unborn baby. Medical images such as these are stored across the globe by hospitals as part of the ever growing patient record databases. You will regularly read blogs about the use of data deduplication to reduce the amount of data stored and transmitted, however patient records is one area where deduplication seldom helps. As an example and in no connection to the Duke and Duchess except by name, the Cambridge University Hospital in the UK has been using EMC Centera for a number of years to store such data.

Many hospitals now find that storing this data can be a major obstacle  while EMC Centera can store this data perfectly well, few hospitals have the data centre space to dedicate to such arrays. ESG research in 2011 indicated in North America that total storage Continue Reading

In the last two weeks of June two power interruptions in one of Amazon’s US data centres resulted in outages for some of its AWS customers. The internet and in particular Twitter were awash with people passing comment or, in the case of some of those affected, bemoaning the impact.  Post mortems followed – and discussions on the web continue. Some customers moved their services back Continue Reading

Lady Backup has spent the last 3 weeks in 3 different desert regions.  It’s been glorious – sunny and 38C or hotter.

Here in Las Vegas for EMC World, the analogy was made to rain water in the desert and backup capacity.  Rainwater vaporizes almost instantly when it hits scorching pavement, never really quenching the Earth.  Similarly, no matter how much backup capacity added it is dwarfed by ever-growing data volumes.  I wish I could take credit for the analogy (as you know I love analogies… the crazier the better.  For example, see yesterday’s blog post).  No, this analogy came from Pat Gelsinger, president and COO of EMC’s Information Infrastructure Products.

We can’t do much to help the rainfall situation in the desert but we have good news for parched data centers around the world.  First, we introduced the new Data Domain DD990.  This new high-end purpose built backup appliance is 6x faster and offers 3x more capacity than the competition.

While speed and capacity matter to keep up with the vastness of the digital universe, we’ve made some other enhancements with the DD990.  For example, we’ve made enhancements with the Data Integrity Architecture, which gives you peace of mind by Continue Reading

Lady Backup likes it hot and sunny. But what’s great for the human spirit isn’t so great for data centers.
I hadn’t really thought very much about this until a story I read recently in The Wall Street Journal about a trend of companies building data centers in cold climates to offset costs of cooling data centers. Google, for example, is using an old paper mill in Hamina, Finland for a new data center – it cost about €200 million to retrofit the mill as a data center. The average yearly temperature is 2 degrees Celsius (definitely not a climate for Lady Backup!) in Finland so it makes it attractive for a data center site. The other part of the attraction of this facility is the use of a seawater cooling system.

The data explosion – driven by commercial and consumer usage – is driving the need to rethink cooling of data centers. It’s logical to locate data centers in places where nature can help contribute to the cooling process. Google, for example, consumed 2.26 terawatt hours last year, which is more than the electricity consumed by 200,000 American homes, according to the Wall Street Journal. By locating a data center in Finland, Google is looking to lower its electricity consumption to keep its new data center cool.

There are two questions on my mind. Continue Reading