I am researching the following features for Computer Weekly, with deadlines in June:
Data gravity
What is data gravity, what implications does it have for data storage, and to what extent can it be mitigated
The piece will over these points:
- What is data gravity? (for a definition see this TechTarget article)
- What causes it?
- Give examples, large and smaller-scale perhaps, on-prem and cloud, any trends (eg, to edge?)
- What impact does it have on data storage?
- What impact does it have on cost, management etc.
- What can be done, from a storage perspective, to mitigate data gravity?
Deadline for contributions: Monday 6 June.
Global file systems
What are ‘global file systems’, who are the main vendors and what are the key differences between their products?
What are the common features of the ‘global file system’ products offered by vendors
What customer challenges do they solve?
How do they differ from file-and-sync services or just using the cloud?
Note, this piece will build on an earlier article (here) but will focus on the specific vendors in the space and their offerings. Please contact me directly for information on the vendors.
Deadline for contributions: Monday 13 June.
Backup maintenance
What do you need to do to ensure backups are maintained and reliable?
This is an advisory article setting out what should be done to ensure backups are maintained, and work. This will include cloud, virtualised and container environments.
Points we hope to cover include:
- Ensuring all sources that need to be backed up are backed up
- Ensuring backup targets are maintained and accessible
- Potential areas of risk or failure, including hardware and human factors
- Testing
- Potential human, infrastructure etc failures
- The need to keep backup software up to date.
Deadline for contributions: Friday 17 June.
For all these articles please contact me by email in the first instance, if you are contributing to a specific article please note that in the subject line. Many thanks.