Tom Leyden

Here is an answer I wrote to my dear friend StorageBod’s latest piece on Object Storage. As my response turned out quite a bit longer than initially intended, I thought I’d post it here as well. Hi Martin, Very nice blog post as usual. Let me sacrifice my first sunny afternoon of the year in Belgium to write down some of my thoughts (rather than copy/pasting a data sheet  like Paul did). Oh and … NAB would have been so much better with you over there,. Disclaimer: I am still in charge of the object storage product line at DDN. The below thoughts are my own, however, not necessarily the company’s. “Yet, it isn’t really happening”. I expect to be punished for writing this, but Martin: you are WRONG! Object storage is happening very much. Just not necessarily out in the open. Implementing object storage is a lot more game-changing than buying a new filer from a supplie... (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)

EUFA Active Archive

Amplidata is presenting the AmpliStor active archive solution at IBC 2011 in Amsterdam this week. Similar to our experience at NAB in Las Vegas earlier this year, the response to our story is very positive. In case you didn’t know, Amplidata enables companies to build active archives that provide instant access to their archived media files. Apart from presenting our own products, the show has been an interesting learning opportunity. One use case that I found particularly interesting, is that of UEFA: someone who used to work at EUFA until very recently explained to me that the U... (more)

A Brief History of Cloud Computing

Someone asked me to give him an overview of Cloud Computing in “a one pager”. I think I failed, but I tried  Cloud Computing is the most important trend in the IT Industry. Even the biggest critics seem to agree that – in spite of some over-zealous marketeers – Cloud Computing is one of the most important paradigm shifts of the past decades. But what is it all about? Where did it come from? And what's to be expected? There are probably as many definitions of Cloud Computing as there are self-acclaimed Cloud Specialist. Most of those definitions include pay-per-use, instant avai... (more)

Amplidata: The Shape of Cloud Start-Ups to Come?

I had expected the Cloud hype to start slowing down for a while now. I have always strongly believed in the paradigm shift that came with Cloud Computing (self-provisioning, pay-per-use, hardware abstraction, etc.) but the popularity was just too much. Recipe for a hype? Take a big bowl of economic recession, add a spoonful of promising technology, some VC’s who have lost it and let it boil slowly. Serve warm with some new social media and some early critics. Nothing indicates, however, that “Cloud” is slowing down. While we all know that getting VC money is even harder today th... (more)