While in China I’ve come across a lot of customers building very large storage systems. Much of this is for video surveillance. They want a big, cheap bucket into which they will record hours and hours of surveillance from millions of cameras (and yes, there are millions of cameras in China).
Now “performance” is never seen […]

Howdy folks,
No, I haven’t disappeared off the the face of the planet … currently in China extolling the virtues of all things Adaptec to those who will listen or can understand me (no, I don’t speak Mandarin apart from a few common words). Thought it was time to do something about this blog for 2010 […]

Well folks, it’s that time of year again … eat too much … drink as much as the wife will allow and generally forget about all things computing for far too short a time.
For many of us this is time to chill out, hit the beach, sink a few tinnies and generally recharge the batteries. […]

Just finished a quick road trip to the other side of the country where I was espousing the benefits of our new MaxIQ product. As a consequence of talking to database integrators we spent a lot of time discussing existing implementations that they were having problems with (and therefore candidates for MaxIQ).
Something that came to […]

I was working the stand on a tradeshow recently when a very nice gentleman stopped by to ask me some performance questions about our RAID cards. This is not an unusual scenario, but this customer’s system was pretty unique and it made me think quite a bit about what different poeple are looking for from […]

This should have nothing to do with RAID. I should not even ever have to comment on such an issue. You’d think in this day and age with all our fancy technology we’d have this right by now … NOT A CHANCE FOLKS!
Chatting with the tech support folks over a few ales is like watching […]

I recently read a draft document aimed at outlining RAID maintenance “best practices”. This has been developed to counter some of the insane practices of our customers such as recycling used drives in RAID configs because the drive “seems OK”.
While the document jumps pretty much straight into proprietary and unique Adaptec features, it made me […]

I have been seeing a lot of people using 1.5Tb and greater hard drives lately, and find myself getting pretty uncomfortable about them using plain old RAID5 for 12-16 1.5Tb drives.
With the failure rate of SATA drives not being something to smile about, and the length of time required to rebuild arrays of this size, […]

I was madly making RAID arrays the other day to do some testing, when a message popped up on the screen … “The selected configuration allows for the creation of a logical device with Enclosure Level Redundancy. This will override any second-level devices selection that you have made. Do you want to configure Enclosure Level […]

All the hype in Australia at the moment is the National Broadband Network … basically fibre to the node everywhere (fibre to all homes and businesses). Now no-one believes it’s going to happen in the next 6 months but the current government has a firm commitment to get this going.
So what implications will that have […]