Have you ever thought about what a backup is? I mean ?really ?think about it? I hadn’t until I read this piece by Preston de Guise. It seems that most of what I had thought about backups were either a tautology (a successful backup is a…backup), or relied on unspoken assumptions.
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NAS Effect: 10TB Western Digital Red Drives
Western Digital is enabling the network attached hoarder in your life. They’ve beefed up their WD Red and Red Pro lines with up to 10TB per helium-filled drive. To hit this capacity, WD is using seven 1.42 TB platters per drive, up from six on last year’s capacity topping 8TB models.
Microsoft Opening Data Centers in Africa
When Amazon announced they were opening an AWS region in Sweden, I asked where they were going to expand next. If you look at their map, there’s a continent shaped hole. Amazon didn’t take the hint, but Microsoft seems to be onboard. The company announced they will be opening up data centers in Cape Town and Johannesburg, starting in 2018.
Quantum Benchmarks
Quantum computing has advanced outside of being purely theoretical or the purview of science fiction. Several companies have specialized computes as their research projects or proof of concepts. IBM put up a publicly available quantum computer for testing with their IBM Q initiative. They’ve now expanded that from an available 5-qubit processor to 16-qubit. But it’s still the Wild West for the field.
For example, simply measuring performance gets surprisingly difficult. It’s easy to forget in classical computing with the bevy of benchmarks available, but even the language for performance on the quantum side isn’t agreed upon. Chris Lee at Ars Technica gives an in-depth look at what IBM is introducing as a measure of quantum computing performance: quantum volume.
The MP3 Has Not Changed
“People aren’t making money on MP3 encoders anymore.” That should have been the headline when Fraunhofer IIS announced they were terminating their licensing program for the codec. But in a ridiculous case of news organizations reporting a press release, many site were declaring the MP3 “dead”. Marco Arment wrote up an excellent piece explaining why this is decidedly wrong.
Ransomeware and Backup Considerations
Richard Arnold put together a concise piece to address a lot of questions and concerns coming out of the WannaCrypt crisis. He outlines a little history and context for what exactly is ransomware. He then takes a storage centric approach to outlining basic IT policies that would help mitigate future disruptions.
The piece is a great summation. It doesn’t have the audacity to say the attack was preventable, but rather that best practices could serve to limit future disruptions. It’s an interesting read to wrap your head around a global issue.
