Publications

Technical analysis of storage technologies

• NetApp's Disaggregated ONTAP and AI Data Engine: Marketing Meets Architecture

  Critical analysis of NetApp's AFX announcement - from the '1 exabyte effective capacity' claim to AIDE's four bundled solutions looking for problems, and why 'proven over decades' doesn't apply to new architectures.

• Scality's 'Pipelines Over Models' Argument: When Storage Vendors Discover AI

  Scality's CTO argues that data pipelines matter more than AI models. Convenient positioning for an object storage vendor - and partially true, but the two-tier storage simplification obscures real infrastructure complexity.

• VAST Data's 'Classical HPC' Framing: When Marketing Rewrites Storage History

  VAST Data positions legacy parallel file systems as obsolete for AI. The technical claims deserve scrutiny - metadata matters, but the 'classical vs. modern' narrative obscures more than it reveals.

• Cloudian's '26 Nines' Durability Claim: When Marketing Exceeds the Age of the Universe

  Mathematical analysis of Cloudian HyperStore's durability claims, from the defensible 14 nines to the physically impossible 26 nines - and why vendors publish numbers that dwarf the universe's existence.

• Dell ECS 'Eleven 9s' Durability: The Claim Without the Calculation

  Dell ECS and ObjectScale claim 99.999999999% durability using standard 12+4 Reed-Solomon erasure coding. The math should be straightforward. So why won't they publish the calculation?

• The Benchmark Problem: When Storage Vendors Claim 'Record-Setting' Performance Without Showing the Tests

  Analysis of unverifiable performance claims from Cloudian and Dell ObjectScale - from '74% improvement' to 'world's fastest' - and why benchmark numbers without methodology are marketing, not engineering.

• The VAST Data Marketing Machine: When Tech Journalism Becomes Promotional Content

  A critical examination of unverifiable claims, promotional language, and the troubling pattern of tech media publishing vendor narratives without scrutiny.

• Understanding VAST Data's Erasure Coding Architecture

  Technical analysis of VAST's three-tier protection architecture, examining metadata write asymmetry, operational complexity, and trade-offs versus traditional Reed-Solomon systems.