Two press releases caught my eye this week that aren’t exactly earth-shattering, but got me thinking about the way the storage market is changing and widening.

First, SanDisk revealed that its flash cards are recording footage of an excursion to Everest by a three-member climbing team sponsored by Dell, Windows Vista, MSN and MSNBC. Here’s a media gallery of the chilly-looking expedition so far.

Then there was also an announcement from RAID, Inc. of its compact Razor RAID array using 2.5-inch SAS drives, billed as “ideal for small spaces such as cockpits, tanks, submarines and other civilian applications with specific space constraints.” The ‘cockpits’ idea got my imagination going.

Between flash memory, with fewer moving parts and power requirements, and small-form-factor hard disks, not to mention the continued increase in content we store digitally, enterprise-level data storage is worming its way into unheard-of environments. As such, many in the industry have been predicting an increasing focus on edge devices, mobile computing environments and the mobile workforce for the storage market. Hopefully enterprise storage managers are paying attention to these new frontiers while architecting storage at headquarters.

Also, since it’s Friday, and who couldn’t use a laugh? Check out this priceless Gizmodo post on an internal Microsoft sales video that recently made its awkward YouTube debut. Key line: “You’ve gotta wonder how, in a company the size of Microsoft, there’s not a single person who [can] step up and say “Hey, you know what? This Vista music video we’re making for the sales department, complete with a cheesy Bruce Springsteen impersonator and horrible music, damages the dignity of not only everyone involved in its production, but everyone who watches it.”

Last August I wrote about Swiss research facility CERN and its plan to store petabytes of data from its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) device on commodity NAS and in tape silos for scalability and cost savings. A month ago, it came to my attention that some people thought the collection of that data beginning in May might create a black hole that will eat the Earth.

Anybody who’s ever been exposed to TimeCube will know that just because people are shouting about something scientific on the Internet doesn’t make it solid science or make them experts. So my first post on the black hole issue was tongue in cheek–and it still all seems far-fetched (which is what CERN apparently wants us to believe…cue spooky music).

But since that post, more people with a bit more gravitas have come forward with black hole concerns. Such as a Scientific American blogger who commented on my original post. And former U.S. nuclear safety officer Walter Wagner, who according to MSNBC has filed a lawsuit against CERN to stop LHC in Hawaii.

There’s one puzzling element of the story about the lawsuit for me: the MSNBC writer says conferences on the suit are scheduled for June 16. In part, the suit seeks a temporary restraining order to keep CERN from turning on LHC until everybody’s satisfied it’s not going to bring about Armageddon. But last I knew, LHC was supposed to start up in May, making that hearing on the restraining order about a month too late if something disastrous does happen…

P.S. Speaking of lawsuits (or, at least, potential lawsuits), I got a very interesting followup call to my story on Atrato this week from a man who declined to tell me who exactly he is or why he’s interested, but who claims not to have been able to find evidence of the more than 100 patents Atrato claims for its Self-managing Array of Idle Disks. (An Atrato spokesperson sent a link to a Google search page when asked for a list of the patents.)

One thing this followup caller did happen to mention to me is that he’s an attorney in Minnesota. The light bulb went on…there’s another Minnesota-based company that has been rumored to be working on a product very similar to Atrato’s.

Could just be coincidence, though.

The other day I blogged about an update to the ”Digital Universe” report EMC sponsored with IDC, which amended estimates of the size of said digital universe upward.

Today while surfing around I saw EMC blogger Chuck Hollis’s post on the report, which contained an intriguing tidbit:

By the way, there’s some new bling for your PC.  Last year, as part of the study, EMC offered up a “digital clock” that attempted to measure all information produced in aggregate. 

This year, there’s a “personal digital clock” that (after answering a few questions) will estimate just how much digital footprint you’re creating: both directly and indirectly.  It’s a bit humbling.

As an example, the personal clock estimates that I’ve created well over a terabyte of “digital shadow” this year so far.  And that’s not even counting these blog posts!

Just doing my part for the storage industry, I guess…

I was definitely interested in finding out the exact dimensions of my digital shadow (proven fact: self-absorption is a key driver of Internet traffic), so I downloaded the mini-application they’ve put together with IDC to calculate one’s digital footprint.

It asked a series of questions about surfing habits, the amount of minutes you spend on the phone per week, the amount of TV you record on your TiVo, that sort of thing. I was actually a little embarrassed at some of the numbers I put in–some of them were high indeed, especially the ‘hours per week you are actively on the Internet’ one.

Once I’d answered the questionnaire, the applicaton calculated that I generate 6.18 GB of personal digital information per day, meaning that this year I will generate 2.25 TB of digital shadow.

Hollis, meanwhile, writes that he’s already generated over 1 TB this year. Today, March 13, is the 72nd day of 2008, putting him at about 13 GB per day, if my calculations are accurate. Given I spend virtually all of my working hours actively on the internet and estimated around five or so hours per day on the phone if you combine cell and land line usage, plus a hard drive partition bulging with over 8,000 digital photos … I have to wonder just what Hollis is doing to generate such a shadow.

You too can find out how much you’re contributing daily to the storage industry via the mini-app, which is posted for download here.

It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with storage, but I got a chuckle out of this story from Reuters UK today about a lawsuit filed against IBM:

A small Japanese bank has slapped International Business Machines Corp with a $107 million lawsuit, saying the technology giant failed to properly deliver on a computer deal.

Suruga Bank, based in Shizuoka Prefecture west of Tokyo, hired IBM in 2004 to help overhaul its computer system, but later baulked [sic] at the proposed changes.

“We are suing because we decided it would be difficult to implement the system they suggested,” a spokesman for the bank said.

Kind of a dangerous precedent for storage vendors if this suit is successful, don’t you think?

I’m sure any number of you can come up with witty figurative responses to that, but I actually mean it literally.

Back in August I did a case study on CERN, the world’s largest physics laboratory, in Switzerland, and the petabytes of data storage that are going to support research on its Large Hadron Collider (LHC). LHC is a 12-story-high, 10-mile-wide underground system of tunnels, magnets and sensors that’s designed to do no less than recreate atomic conditions at the creation of the universe and capture particles that until now have been only theoretical.

Having spoken with CERN about their research and the way the whole system is set up, I was surprised when I logged in to my personal email this morning and got a friend request from a profile titled STOP CERN. According to the profile:

This space has been set up to spread awareness of the risks a project due to be launched at CERN next year poses to our planet. For the first time in many decades someone has built a machine that exceeds all our powers of prediction, and although they estimate the possibility of accidentally destroying the planet as extremely low, the LHC propaganda machine that ‘everything is safe’ is well funded by your tax dollars, paying large salaries to thousands of people who have much to lose financially should the LHC be unable to prove its safety. As most of them perceive the risk to be small, they are willing to take that ’small risk’ at our expense. The actual risk cannot presently be calculated, and a Large Hadron Collider [LHC] legal defense fund has even been set up to challenge CERN on the project.

I don’t have any kind of physics background, so I don’t know if the criticisms are legit, but I was doubly surprised to find that the MySpace profile is only the tip of the iceberg of people questioning CERN. In addition to some other critical websites, an LHC Legal Defense Fund has been started with the goal of legally intervening to stop CERN from turning on LHC this May, creating a black hole within the collider and accidentally destroying the planet.

By the way, isn’t that really every geek’s dream? To be working on a machine that even theoretically could accidentally destroy the planet?

Anyway, the debate seems to be whether or not something called “Hawking evaporation” (presumably named after physicist Stephen Hawking) will neutralize the microscopic black holes that could be created by the particle collisions in LHC, or if they’ll continue to grow and, well, eat France.

According to another anti-CERN site:

If MBH’s [microscopic black holes] are created, there is a likelyhood [sic] that some could fall unimpeded to the centre of the Earth under gravity…Scientists have estimated that a stable black hole at the center of the earth could consume not only France but the whole planet in the very short time span of between 4 minutes and 30 seconds and 7 minutes.

I’m a little more inclined to believe the multiple accredited physics organizations around the world involved in the LHC project know what they’re doing than I am to believe some people I’ve never heard of from the Internet, but what do I know? The criticism has at least been strong enough to prompt CERN to post a kind of FAQ page about black holes, strangelets, and all manner of interesting potential doomsday scenarios that have been envisioned for LHC.

Despite the impressive power of the LHC in comparison with other accelerators, the energies produced in its collisions are greatly exceeded by those found in some cosmic rays. Since the much higher-energy collisions provided by Nature for billions of years have not harmed the Earth, there is no reason to think that any phenomenon produced by the LHC will do so.

Wouldn’t it just be something, though, if after centuries of war and pollution and all the other things mankind has done to compromise the planet, Armageddon was actually brought about by a bunch of guys in a physics lab?

As a storage reporter who’s also a fanatical Red Sox fan, I’m in good position to comment on EMC’s latest marketing move: the agreement with the Boston Red Sox to place a small patch with the EMC logo on the Red Sox uniform shirt during the team’s trip to Japan in April.

The ‘work’ side of me understands why both the team and EMC would be interested in this joint venture. EMC has already sponsored an entire level of Fenway Park, and its logo is plastered about in many places at the old grounds. The Red Sox, under MLB’s mandate to expand its global reach, need to bring a $200 million team halfway around the world for Opening Day, and ticket prices are already $90. Doesn’t seem like they have a whole lot of choice.

But the sports fan in me remembers the flak when there was talk of displaying ads for Spiderman II on the bases used in games. Heck, in Boston, the sanctity of the Green Monster–historically a billboard anyway–has been cited in decrying advertisers. The problem for Red Sox management is that they are working with a very valuable, but very finicky brand.

At the end of the day, the Red Sox are a sports franchise, and a business, and entertainment. But many people in Boston have deeper feelings about the team–it’s a cultural institution for many people, and for some, even a sacred one. Putting an advertiser’s logo on one of the bases at the same park where Ted Williams played. . .well, you might have an easier time convincing a churchgoer to accept corporate sponsorship on the altar. I know some Red Sox fans who fear that baseball will eventually become like NASCAR, with jerseys so bedecked in ads you can’t tell what team they’re supposed to be for. To see this happen to the Red Sox, for many people in EMC’s home state, would be agony.

Not every Red Sox fan feels this way, and I can’t speak for everyone in Boston–and certainly not Japan, where the logos will be displayed in part to announce EMC’s sponsorship of Major League Baseball. But I will say that the popular fan blog / Boston Globe subsidiary Boston Dirt Dogs posted a photo yesterday of Larry Lucchino holding up the patch at a press conference with the headline, “Nothing’s sacred.” Even though it’s only going to be in Japan, and even though it’s just one logo, it’s the first time the Red Sox uniform has displayed any corporate logo that didn’t belong to the sporting-goods company that manufactured it. I don’t count on a lot of Red Sox fans buying that it’s not a slippery slope.

To people outside the day-to-day baseball melodrama that surrounds the Red Sox, I understand why that might seem silly. And a little hypocritical, if you think about it, because recent attempts by a Boston City Councilman to remove the giant neon Citgo sign from the roof of a building in Kenmore Square in protest of Hugo Chavez met with derision from Sox purists. I can also understand why EMC would want to become another Citgo–to have its logo become another cultural icon, particularly as they try to expand into the consumer storage space, and for the first time have a message for the consumers that fill the ballpark.

Problem is, I don’t think it’ll work. Things are different than when the Citgo sign was installed. Nowadays the sign isn’t really seen as an advertisement so much as a landmark, and its visibility just over the top of the Green Monster from inside the park has made it as much a part of the landscape there as home plate. But in general, corporations and their products are not seen as friendly companions or benevolent institutions. People are going to the ballpark in Boston for entertainment, yes, but also to reconnect with an experience that feels genuine, a throwback to a simpler time. An advertising logo on a uniform that’s barely changed in 100 years isn’t going to sit well in that context.

Over the last few weeks, storage insiders have been abuzz with speculation that a merger between HP and Symantec is imminent. Whether such talks are occurring, I can not definitively say, but if it does occur, the whole corporate world might as well kiss goodbye any hopes it had of creating and managing a heterogeneous storage environment.

Obviously, I’m exaggerating a bit. Kissing heterogeneity goodbye won’t happen the day such a deal is signed (if it occurs), and it probably won’t ever completely happen. HP and Symantec will likely both pledge that heterogeneous support will remain part of their product roadmaps. And, it’s likely that is true. However, one can almost bet that when it comes time to prioritize which storage products are tested first in conjunction with future releases of Symantec’s Veritas storage software that HP’s storage products will find their way to the head of the line.

More disconcerting is what Symantec’s acquisition by HP (or whoever they are acquired by or merge with) would mean for the future of heterogeneous storage environments in general. At one time, Symantec was on the vanguard of supporting an enterprise heterogeneous storage environment. Yet, now no one is really shocked or even appears overly concerned when Symantec is mentioned as a candidate for an acquisition or merger by what is traditionally considered a storage hardware vendor.

This mindset is testimony to changing user concerns and priorities. It used to be that storage hardware was the primary cost in user data center. Not anymore. Now, it is the management of the storage hardware — even if a user buys all of the hardware from the same storage vendor.

The complexity associated with managing storage hardware from multiple different vendors has become a mind-boggling exercise. While at one time it may have been worthwhile to spend the extra time and money to verify if an HP-UX server worked with an IBM storage system, now it is questionable if that is still the case. Instead I sense an increased willingness on the part of users to pay a premium to buy all of their storage hardware and software from one vendor and avoid checking multiple different support matrixes that using heterogeneous environments requires.

The looming acquisition or merger of Symantec, regardless of by who, signals the re-emergence of an old systems management philosophy. Companies no longer want a one trick pony for their storage management needs, even if that one trick pony manages heterogeneous storage environments. Instead more companies appear to want a return to simpler times where they buy all of their storage hardware and software from one vendor that all work nicely together. Let’s just hope that if companies have to revert back to this philosophy, that it works better this time than it did in the past.

Imagine you’re a down-on-her-luck new divorcee looking to get back on her feet. The year is 1999. You manage to find a job as an in-house masseusse at a little Silicon-Valley dotcom startup for $450 a week and stock options for a company nobody’s really heard much about yet.

Eight years later, you retire a millionaire.

Sound far-fetched? It is, but it’s exactly what’s happened as a result of Google’s rise to Internet dominance and accompanying $700+ share price over the last few weeks, according to a New York Times report.

Even more interesting–according to the Times:

Although no one keeps an official count of Google millionaires, it is estimated that 1,000 people each have more than $5 million worth of Google shares from stock grants and stock options.

I wonder if there are any Google millionaires reading this right now. If so, you’re buying lunch.

“Boss”. Photo courtesy of TartanRacing.org.

Nope, nobody slipped anything into my morning coffee–this did actually happen. NetApp was a member of the Tartan Racing Team, a group comprised of engineers from Carnegie-Mellon university and corporate sponsors / partners, including GM, Caterpillar and Continental. Tartan was facing off against other teams, each spearheaded by a university robotics group such as MIT or Cornell and joined by technology and automotive vendors, in a contest to create vehicles that give new meaning to the word “automatic.”

The contest is run by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), the same government entity (along with Al Gore) credited with creating the Internet. DARPA set up a twofold challenge for each research team in a robotics competition to create a vehicle that could drive itself, unmanned, through any terrain, and created a twofold contest–one race in the desert and one in an urban environment–to test the entries.

NetApp has sold some of its small filers into military accounts for use on transport vehicles in combat zones, but this time didn’t contribute technology to the car itself–more like the car workshop, where NetApp storage was used to log and analyze data as the vehicle was developed.

Tartan and its creation, a Chevy Tahoe dubbed “Boss,” were the winners in the desert portion of the race, 170 miles which only three of 11 teams finished. Tartan also won the 60-mile urban course, in which 6 teams finished. The Discovery Channel will be covering the DARPA contest and all its entrants in a multi-part miniseries set to air in the spring, NetApp officials said; the network even brought in the stars of Mythbusters to act as TV analysts for the event.

The whole event was put on in fun, of course, but imagine the creepy possibilities of this technology: unstoppable, unmanned tanks storming cities; unmanned SUVs hunting in streets for the enemy. How would you even defend against something like that? It boggles the mind.

“Well,” pointed out Chris Urmson, director of technology for the Urban Challenge at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon, somewhat uncomfortably cutting off my Calvin-like woolgathering. “It’s not just a weapon.” Urmson pointed out that one of the primary use cases envisioned by the military for unmanned vehicles is the creation of a kind of trackless train comprised of driverless SUVs following one manned vehicle in the front, cutting down on the casualties associated with supply convoys in combat zones. The driverless cars also have possible commercial applications (Minority Report, anyone?) as well as a possible place in agriculture.

I just sometimes have a little too vivid an imagination.

The AP has reported that execs in Cisco’s Brazilian business unit have been arrested on suspicion of smuggling and tax fraud. Yikes.

Add this to the “storage / networking police blotter” over the last year, which has included such bizarre cases as the HP pretexting flak and a more recent instance of a NetApp manager accused of embezzling travel funds.

Anybody care to start a betting pool on which people from which big company will show up in the news next? It could be like a game of Clue…“EMC, middle managers, jaywalking, in New York City!” “IBM, Board of Directors, unpaid parking violations, in Research Triangle!”

Okay, maybe that’s just me.