Robert Novak

When I started supporting enterprise application platforms at the turn of the century, the model was pretty simple: a single, huge server with expensive high-performance storage behind it. If you outgrew the storage, you could add more, and if you outgrew the server, you bought the next larger box.…

There’s a line in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland where Alice says “It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.” Some days I feel that way about my storage infrastructures as well. I fell down a particular rabbit-hole into storage management accidentally…

Someone at a meeting recently told me how cool it was that big data was finally moving out of the early adopter phase. He’s lucky I wasn’t drinking a beverage at the time, or he might have ended up wearing it. I’m accused of being sort of a unicorn when it comes to the Big Data eco…

Big Data is better than a sharp stick in the eye. I can say this with great authority, since I missed the first half of Strata+Hadoop World 2015 in San Jose because of the latter. But eye injuries have never kept me offline for long, and I was able to follow online with what I didn’t see in pe…

I was thinking about security over the last month or two; it comes to mind pretty often when working in technology and when listening to news coverage of technology. But that’s not my topic today. I got a bit distracted. You see, when I was very young, my mother would lose her glasses regularl…

If there was a developing market opportunity that would bring you $19 trillion (with a “T”), you’d probably be interested, wouldn’t you. If that market’s impact on the world–not just the technology sphere–was going to have 5-10 times the impact ten years fro…

The Internet of Everything is a big thing, and it’s going to get bigger. As more devices, sensors, gadgets, and people get interconnected, you’ll hear more and more about it. But there’s one aspect of the Internet of Everything that I don’t hear a lot about. That aspect is se…