SNIA IOTTA Repository offers boatload of real IO traces 
By Tyler Bletsch - Thursday, December 17, 2009, 01:12 PM - Storage technology
The SNIA IOTTA Repository offers a variety of real large-scale IO traces from a number of environments. These will prove invaluable to storage simulation or validation experiments.
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Flash based storage not so energy efficient? 
By Tyler Bletsch - Thursday, July 3, 2008, 12:06 AM - Power-aware computing, Storage technology
Tom's Hardware tested the power and performance of current Solid State Disks (SSDs) both in terms of performance and power. While the performance numbers were as expected, it turns out that the flash based drives' energy utilization is no better than a traditional 7200 RPM hard disk for a practical workload based on the MobileMark benchmark. The authors contend that this is because hard disks reach their maximum power draw only when seeking, whereas flash storage uses full power during any IO activity.
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ext3cow - A file system that preserves the past 
By Tyler Bletsch - Wednesday, May 2, 2007, 12:31 PM - Storage technology, Software news
The ext3cow file system has been released for the 2.6 Linux kernel. This extension to ext3 adds "copy on write" (cow) functionality, which in turn allows the user to view the file system as it existed in the past. Unlike fixed checkpointing, this means that a user could dial in any time whatsoever, and see a consistent filesystem from that moment. It would be interesting to see what the performance characteristics of the system are.

If you're interested, you can get it from ext3cow.com; it consists of a kernel patch based on kernel 2.6.20.3, as well as some userland tools.
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