Kate's Comment

I contend that the next stage of evolution of storage is “Just a Bunch of Disks” (JBOD), comprised of a range of media types with different performance characteristics, and with software doing the cleverness. In this first post (1 of 2) I shall address the resilience aspects of this evolution. RAID failings Large RAID (Redundant Array of Independant Disks) systems…

The last few months have been interesting for “preppers”. Preppers are generally excessively bright people who are consequently rather paranoid and worry about events which might bring about the end of civilised society and try make preparations so that they are better-suited to survive the breakdown a civilisation. I consider myself among them, though my efforts are not particularly extreme;…

Scarcely a day passes by where you don’t see a headline about “Big Data” and how analysis of this big data is going to lead to huge efficiencies, targeted marketing and large profits. But are there really huge profits to be made out of data analytics (or data mining as it used to be known), both for companies collecting data…

Islay I’ve been taking a bit of a break from comms lately, in more ways than one. It started with a holiday to Islay (a wee Scottish island) where my partner, Izzy, and I had a great time. She is a freshwater conservationist specialising in rare aquatic plants so we split our time between poking around looking for it in…

I’ve been a heavy Twitter user for a while, enough to help earn me Computer Weekly’s title of Social Media Champion, and historically have been an advocate of social media. However, a while ago it started to worry my just how much of my “thought stream” I was giving Twitter et al. This was especially pertinent since I have two…

In stark contrast to my assertion that the Internet of Things revolution is about to ignite, driven by hackers, I have long contended that we don’t actually need more than one or two personal information devices in our lives (I still expect the Internet of Things to be made up mostly of autonomous devices). Thus far my personal experience is…

As we enter 2012, and the world economy continues to stutter, teetering on the brink of another global recession fuelled this time not by the banks defaulting, but the prospect of entire governments being declared bankrupt. In my last post I described how I believe that the time is nonetheless ripe for a technology revolution, and indeed one befitting times…

Over Christmas I have been pondering on the question of what the next big thing in technology will be, specifically in 2012. That question is perhaps especially poignant since we recently we lost one of our generation’s great innovators, Steve Jobs. When I recently took delivery of my magic mouse I was struck by how aptly it was named. If…

Here I provide a less technical description of cloud computing, which can be regarded as essentially the provision of computing resources and/or software as a utility, in the same way that your business uses familiar utilities, such as electricity, water, gas etc. Cloud computing enables you to pay for computing resources as you need them. These services are provided over the internet, on a consumption-based pay-as-you-use model, with short-term contracts and without up-front expenditure.

A couple of months ago HP started rumors that the G-Cloud had been canned, but that is most certainly not the case. I have spoken to a number of government officials and can confirm that it is going ahead. But what will it actually be, and is that what it should be? I was technical co-lead on phase two of…