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Dell Warming up the Storage Paradox

Michael Dell has warmed up IDC’s Storage Paradox during his town hall meeting today. IDC originally estimated:

“the world will produce 988 exabytes of data in 2010 – but only 601 exabytes of storage will be available.”

Dell’s accelerated version:

“This year the amount of digital data will surpass the digital storage capacity available. If we don’t do something, we are going to lose that data.”

Like I’ve said before, I’m not worried:

  • Last I checked, data storage was not a natural resource, it is manufactured. Why wouldn’t market forces take care of balancing demand and supply?
  • Just where exactly would the excess “data” exist? Right now I am typing this post – but if I don’t save/post/send it, it does not get stored anywhere, it won’t become data – it won’t exist at all. (for simplicity forget caching and autosave). Does IDC count our thoughts as data?

Clearly, Michael Dell must also realize the paradoxical nature of this statement, since he offers a solution: the Dell PowerVault MD3000i.

The On-Demand model is another solution, effectively reducing storage requirements: since we work natively online, it will be easier to share & link, we don’t have to send and store redundant copies of the same file.

Related posts: Between the Lines, InfoWorld and The Register

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OpenDNS Shortcuts (are) were More Like Detours

Use OpenDNS (Updated)
Using OpenDNS instead of your ISP’s default supposedly speeds up your surfing experience – it’ s probably true, see ZDNet’s explanation.

However, there’s one feature – a convenience – you should avoid, and ironically it’s called a shortcut. Ironically, because in reality it’s more like a long detour.

For example I have t set up for www.techmeme.com. Here’s my little experience this morning:

Conclusion: OpenDNS may be fast, except when it has to access it’s own server – you’re better off not using shortcuts.

I obviously cleared the browser cache before each step. Stats were measured by the Load Time Analyzer FireFox plugin by Google, and the results are displayed using the Zoho Viewer.

Update: I received several helpful comments, from OpenDNS’s David Ulevitch and Paul Stamatiou who wrote a pretty good review of the shortcut feature earlier. They both pointed me to this system status message, which indicates an earlier server issue this morning, at the time I ran my tests is now resolved.

I have actually experienced slowdowns for days now, which of course was only my subjective feeling, but in the end that’s what prompted me to look for diagnostic tools and run the tests today.

That said, I ran the tests again, under the same conditions, repeatedly, and the results are around 2000ms , with only 3-400ms difference between the ‘shortcut’ and the full URL method. I guess that means OpenDNS is back to normal. Thumbs-up

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Attachments are Evil – Link, don’t Send

Well.. not fully .. just yet. But I’ve argued it would be so in a recent post: Flow vs. Structure: Escaping From the Document & Directory Jungle.

Forget attachments, the version control nightmare, software incompatibility issues, storage requirements: share documents by URL. That’s what the newly released Zoho Viewer enables you to do with your Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint files as well as PDF, RTF, ODF and OpenOffice documents. It’s private, not indexed by Google or other search engines, so you don’t have to worry about leaking confidential data, yet you can easily share documents, right from the Viewer interface, or by using the URL it generates. Essentially it’s a TinyURL, SnipURL ..etc for documents, with additional options, like embedding the URL, tracking the number of views, or even editing your uploaded doc’s with the relevant Zoho programs.

While it’s really simple to use, here’s an intro video :

Attachments are Evil… smile_angry

Related posts: Lifehacker, Wired, TechCrunch, Digital Inspiration, Zoho Blogs.

Update: (2/13/08):  ReadWriteWeb introduces PDFMeNot, a similar service for PDF’s only.