Tom Leyden

NAB kept me totally away from all the interesting online discussions last week. It’s too late to respond to @JoinToigo’s tweet (we’d call this Figs after Easter in Dutch), but I thought I’d share my thoughts in a bit more than 140 characters. The short answer is no … but a better answer is very much *yes*. The first file systems were not designed with the thought of petabytes of data. I don’t know what the exact projections were back then, but gigabytes must have sounded pretty sci-fi. Bytes and kilobytes were a lot more common. We didn’t think that we’d soon all be creating tens if not hundreds of multi-megabyte files per day. File systems have of course evolved a lot and some have become so popular you could actually say they have a fan base (I’d need to do research on ZFS fan clubs). It is clear that the file system has played a very important role in the evolut... (more)

Cloud Questions: it’s all about applications if you ask me

We’re less than two months out of the next CloudCamp. As usual that means, we’re getting some question to give our thoughts on. I have to say the questions were really good this time. So I thought I’d share them here as well. Q: Agree or disagree? – “While the IT savings aspect is compelling, the strongest benefit of cloud computing is how it enhances business agility.” While I’m not sure whether cloud actually saves IT money, business agility is for sure the biggest benefit. And I believe there is a lot more to come. So far we’ve seen a lot of activity on the IAAS and SAAS levels... (more)

Object Storage for Big Unstructured Data

Big Data is Big, but it also causes a lot of confusion. Big Data is used for anything related storage these days, so people don’t know anymore what it exactly is. Is it Hadoop? Is it analytics? It doesn’t need to be that complicated though. There are two kinds of Big Data: Big Data (for analytics) and Big Unstructured Data. Big Data for analytics is a paradigm that became popular in the previous decade. A lot of innovation was done for research projects. New technology enabled researchers in many different domains to capture data in a way they had never been able to do before. I... (more)

Big Challenges with Unstructured Information

I had the honor of organizing a panel at the Createasphere Digital Asset Management Event in Beverly Hills late last month. Apart from the niceness of the Beverly Hilton (Trader Vic’s, the bar by the pool, really gives you that 60ies Hollywood feeling) the real cool thing about the panel was that Robin Harris, a.k.a. StorageMojo, accepted our invitation to moderate the panel. Robin kicked off with his great vision of how the Universe hates your data. I love how that line captures that indeed anything and everything out there will continuously be trying to destroy your data: “ent... (more)

Is iPaaS the Next Thing?

Is iPaaS the next thing? Gartner recently launched iPaaS, Integration Platform as a Service. iPaaS is defined as “a platform for building and deploying applications within the cloud and between the cloud and enterprise”. It enables developers to create integration flows that connect applications that run in the cloud or on-premise, and to deploy them without installing or managing any hardware or middleware. iPaas delivers where PaaS came short: where most PaaS offerings are limiting developers to one single cloud platform, iPaaS is designed to give access to a choice of platfo... (more)