Inspired by a question from @jfrappier, here is a bunch of vendor swag I’ve received over the years that has actually proved useful. Hopefully this will help marketing at the various vendors to invest in useful swag and not pointless landfill. The biggest issue with swag is its marginal utility:… Read More
As part of Data Field Day 1, we spoke to a company called HGST. A team from HGST actually invented the hard drive back in the 1950s, not far from their current office in Silicon Valley. They’ve been bought a sold a few times, most recently to Western Digital, and… Read More
If you haven’t read them already, check out Part 1 and Part 2 in this series. We discussed the rule of thumb for investor returns of 10-20x money raised in the first post in this series. Let’s have a look at some numbers that we actually know to see if… Read More
In a world that’s gone software-defined mad, X-IO Storage are a refreshingly honest company seemingly devoid of hype. They make storage hardware, and specialised hardware at that. For the software-defined cheer-squad, this might sound like madness, but it’s not. First of all, software has to run on something, and that… Read More
X-IO confuse me. My overall impression of X-IO is that they had something interesting and special several years ago, but the changes to the industry have passed now them by. Their 700 series arrays are hybrid SSD/HDD arrays with auto-tiering software to make the flash a kind of persistent cache.… Read More
