Brain Teaser Archive
Brain Teaser for 12/16/2012NASA's Curiosity Mars Science Laboratory is currently streaking towards its destination. Excluding bathroom breaks, it is due to arrive on Mars in about 9 months. Direct teleoperation of a rover on Mars is not possible since the round trip communication time between Earth and Mars ranges from 8 to 42 minutes. Therefore the rover must store the data that allows it to operate automomously in this remote region. Today's Brain Teaser: What is the storage capacity of the Curiosity Rover? Answer: Check back soon! Brain Teaser for 10/21/2011The disk drive industry has always been a race to the top of the capacity ladder. One company holds a rare distinction - they were the first to deliver a 1GB disk drive two times. The first being a 550 pound refridgerator-sized drive, the second (11 years later) a hand-held 5 1/4" drive. Who is this company? Extra points if you can name the dates and models! Answer: In 1980, IBM released the first GB drive, the 3380. At $40,000, this drive was targeted at their most elite customers. Eleven years later, in 1991, IBM shipped the 1GB Corsair drive, setting the capacity standard for small form factor HDD's. More information... More information... Brain Teaser for 10/14/2011One thing storage vendors have known for decades – the more capacity you give your customers, the more they want. The data storage industry recently crossed a new threshold in single-rack storage capacity. This week’s brain teaser: what single rack capacity threshold was recently crossed – and what company crossed it? Answer: At least 2 vendors (Aberdeen and Racktop) recently rolled out 1 Petabyte single-rack storage arrays. Comprised of some 300-odd 3TB drives – these arrays pack a lot of capacity. Look for more arrays in this range as 4TB and 5TB HDD hit the streets. More information... More information... Brain Teaser for 10/07/2011Steve Jobs once famously said “I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me... It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.” After being exiled from Apple, Jobs went on to create NeXT, Inc. – a company whose computers created a lot of data and therefore needed innovative storage devices. Today’s brain teaser – what unusual storage device was standard in the first NeXT Computer, released in 1988? Answer: The NeXT Computer featured a 256MB Magneto-Optical removable disk drive instead of a traditional hard drive, although a traditional HDD was available as an option. More information... More information... Brain Teaser for 09/30/2011Last week’s teaser covered the VHS recorder’s 35th anniversary. There is another storage device also celebrating a milestone this year. The floppy drive, first released in 1971, turns 40 this year and is still produced today by a few vendors. Revolutionizing the world of portable storage, FDD’s were produced in the tens of millions throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s until CD-R’s and USB thumb drives eventually made them obsolete. This week’s teaser: Who is credited with inventing the Floppy Drive? Answer: David Noble led an IBM team that developed an 8” flexible diskette holding 81.6 KB of data. The original disk was bare, but dirt was a problem so they enclosed it in a plastic envelope lined with fabric. More information... Brain Teaser for 09/23/2011This year the VHS recorder celebrates its 35th anniversary. VHS became the standard video recording device for homes around the world before being replaced by compact tape formats, then DVD. But there was another use for VHS – as a computer backup device. One company produced a VHS backup unit that stored 750MB per VHS tape for the bargain price of $12,000. Can you name this company? Answer: Megatape Corporation had success in the late 70s with their “MT” line of tape backup devices, ranging from 150MB to 750MB. Exabyte’s 2.3GB tape drive, however, quickly made the VHS format obsolete. More information... Brain Teaser for 09/16/2011The US Postal Service has been in the news lately for some not-so-good reasons. Cutting services, closing offices, and looming layoffs seem inevitable as we rely more and more on pdf’s and email. Despite this news, the USPS is a remarkable organization: 563 million mail pieces delivered 6 days a week by 215,625 vehicles - the largest civilian fleet in the world. Surely all that mail delivery must generate a lot of data too. That’s our topic for today’s storage brain teaser – what is the total data capacity of the US Postal Service? Answer: The USPS has 17 petabytes of storage capacity, equivalent to 46,000 years of songs on an MP3 player. In addition, they have a total inventory of 939 applications with 478 classified as national applications. Of those, 275 are business critical More information... Brain Teaser for 09/09/2011This weeks storage brain teaser deals with a casualty of the post 9/11 era – the big storage trade shows. One of these show had the misfortune to open on 9/11/2001 in Atlanta, and the other opened two months later in Las Vegas to the sound of crickets. As travelers became reluctant to fly the not-so-friendly skies and companies re-evaluated their events budgets, these large trade shows withered in favor of smaller application-specific shows such as Oracle Open World and VMworld. Can you name these two major storage trade shows that are now a distant memory? Answer: Networld+Interop in Atlanta and Comdex in Las Vegas couldn’t survive the double blow of 9/11 and the dot-com bust. These once-vibrant events have been replaced by the smaller, more focused trade shows of today. More information... More information... Brain Teaser for 09/03/2011We all make statements that we wish we had thought a little more about before we made them. When you are a public figure, those statements take on a long life, thanks to the encyclopedia of the internet. Such a remarque fatale was made by the former CEO of Overland Storage, “We believe the product line we will deliver in October will have all the features they [NetApp] offer today...We just leapfrogged them with this [Zetta] acquisition.” But the product launched with a whimper and never went much beyond the tadpole stage. Today’s storage brain teaser: what CEO made this infamous remark? Answer: Christopher Calisi, CEO of Overland Storage, was a little giddy after the acquisition of Zetta in 2005. But history shows that the product based on this bold prediction (the “Ultamus”) never leapfrogged anyone and Calisi was ousted within a year. More information... More information... Brain Teaser for 08/26/2011This week’s brain teaser is an homage to Steve Jobs, a true visionary. This year, Steve rolled out the iCloud and took us on a tour of the new iCloud data center in North Carolina. If you were listening closely, you learned what the online storage capacity of this behemoth was. That’s this week’s brain teaser – what is the rumored data storage capacity of the iCloud? Answer: The iCloud data center reportedly has over 12,000 Terabytes of storage capacity. Analysis of photos and general speculation sparked rumors that Teradata, NetApp, and EMC all had units parked in the iCloud. More information... More information... More information... Brain Teaser for 08/19/2011Back in the late 1980s, Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) was all the rage. The idea was to create “infinite storage” by migrating unused data to cheap optical storage, and leaving behind a small stub file so that the migrated data could be quickly located and retrieved if needed. Trouble is that optical storage wasn’t cheap, HSM was hard to manage, so users ultimately decided to just buy more disk. Consequently, HSM was eventually migrated out of existence. What Massachusetts company pioneered HSM infinite storage systems before being purchased by EMC in 1993? Answer: Epoch Systems recognized that data growth was a problem and migration to optical media was the answer. However, the price of optical media never dropped much lower than hard disks, making HSM impractical. Epoch was purchased by EMC for $140M. More information... Brain Teaser for 07/29/2011This week’s storage brain teaser deals with something everyone is talking about these days: Cloud Computing. Where did this term come from? Was it a company, a product, the government, or an individual who first proposed “the cloud” to describe the magical place that all data should reside? That’s your mission this week – discover who first used the term “cloud computing” in a public document. Answer: The term Cloud Computing was apparently first documented in a 1997 paper called “Intermediaries in Cloud-Computing” by Dr. Ramnath Chellappa, a professor at Emory University. As mentioned in his bio “He suggested that this would be a new computing paradigm where the boundaries of computing will be determined by economic rationale rather than technical limits alone." Unfortunately, we’ve been unable to retrieve this document from the Cloud…if anyone has access to Dr. Chellappa’s paper, storage-brain would love to post it in our library! More information... Brain Teaser for 07/22/2011For those of you with mathematical minds, this brain teaser deals with a really big number. Scientists consider 2002 to be the year that digital data capacity surpassed the world’s analog capacity – ushering in the digital age that embodies us all today. But just what is the digital storage capacity of all the information in world? Funny you should ask, because that’s our storage brain teaser for this week. If you add up all the available information on all the usable space on hard drives, tapes, CDs, DVDs, and memory (volatile and nonvolatile) – what is the total digital storage capacity of all the information in the world? Answer: According to a study published on February 10, 2011 by USC, looking at both digital memory and analog devices, the researchers calculated that in 2007, humankind was able to store at least 295 exabytes of information. But…the study also mentioned that this capacity doubles every 3 years and 4 months – taking the total around 590 exabytes today.
Here is a short video that discusses the USC study in more detail: http://www.vimeo.com/19779116 More information... More information... Brain Teaser for 07/15/2011This week’s teaser is a bit macabre. Whitey Bulger is back in the news after being captured in plain sight at his beachfront apartment in Southern CA. Whitey is accused of 19 murders, including one that occurred in Tulsa in 1981. This alleged slaying involved the CEO of a prominent data storage company. The question: Who was this victim and what was the storage company he was running at the time? Answer: Roger Wheeler, CEO of Telex Computer Products, was the storage industry executive who was gunned down (purportedly) by a member of Whitey Bulger’s Winter Hill gang, or perhaps by Whitey himself? Wheeler had partnered with ex-IBMer Steven Jatras to produce plug-compatible disk and tape drives for IBM mainframe computers. Although this got him into a little hot water with IBM – it was nothing compared to the trouble that Bulger allegedly caused when Wheeler decided to invest in some Jai-Alai frontons in Florida and Connecticut. I wrote about this infamous storage industry event in a blog a few years back (http://communities.netapp.com/community/netapp-blogs/drdedupe/blog/2009/08/14/deceit-theft-espionage-and-murder-in-the-storage-industry--part-4) – since Whitey is captured and back in the news again this might make for some interesting summer reading. More information... Brain Teaser for 07/08/2011This weeks storage brain teaser will please all you “tape s NOT dead” zealots out there. In 1990, a Boulder, Colorado company introduced a 5 ¼” tape drive with 15x the capacity of its closest rival. This truly revolutionary technology paved the way for future generations of high-density tape drives, keeping them alive and well for another 20+ years. The question: What company produced this tape drive that astonished the industry and what was the model name? Answer: Exabyte’s model Exb-8200 tape drive rocked the storage world with a 2.2GB compact tape format. At the time the dominant tape formats were large reel-to-reel rackmount models and the 150MB quarter-inch cartridge (QIC). The Exb-8200 was based on Sony’s “Data8” 8mm video tape format and set the stage for a later high density tape format battle between 8mm, DLT, and LTO cartridges. Brain Teaser for 06/24/2011Time sharing is described as “an operating system that permits each user of a computer to behave as though he were in sole control of a computer.” Sounds an awful lot like Cloud computing - right? This week’s teaser deals with the birth of cloud computing in the form of time sharing systems. What company (hint: they are also credited with inventing email) demonstrated the first time sharing computer system in 1962? Answer: The answer to this week’s brain teaser is Bolt Beranek and Newman, otherwise known as BBN Technologies. Credited with sending the first email (apparently the very first email message was “QWERTY More information... More information... Brain Teaser for 06/17/2011The Advanced Encryption Standard, or AES, is acknowledged to be the world’s most secure encryption standard. It has never suffered a break-in, and the US government maintains that AES is a sufficient cryptographic method through the year 2031. Today’s teaser traces the roots of this standard. Who invented the AES algorithm, and what year was it approved by the US government for the storage and transmission of secure data? Answer: The Rijndael encryption alogrithim was developed by Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen and approved by the US Government in 2002. More information... Brain Teaser for 06/10/2011This week’s teaser explores the history of the byte. Over the years, storage capacities have grown from megabytes to gigabytes to today’s terabytes. We all know that a byte is a collection of data bits and is the smallest addressable element that a computer works with. But where did to word ‘byte’ originate? That’s this weeks teaser! Submit your answer below… Answer: This week’s teaser should have been an easy one for any of you programmers out there. The term Byte was coined by Dr. Werner Buchholz at IBM in July 1956, during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer. A Byte is generally acknowledged to be 8 bits in length, as opposed to the Nibble (4 bits) or Word (16 or 32 bits). Octet can be used interchangeably with Byte to remove any ambiguity, since no standard Byte length is actually defined. More information... Brain Teaser for 06/03/2011This week’s brain teaser is for all you Flash fanatics out there.
Like all technologies, Flash will eventually be replaced by a new scientific breakthrough. Today there are two experimental technologies that may one day replace Flash with faster, denser, cheaper solid-state memory. Can you name either one? Answer: Anyone watching trends in solid-state storage should have been able to answer last week’s teaser without breaking a sweat:
1) HP plans to ship memristor memory in 2013. Like flash, memristors are nonvolatile – they "remember" their state when power isn't applied to them. HP claims that memristors achieve speeds 10 times that of flash at one-tenth the power budget per cell. They can also be stacked, enabling exceptionally dense memory structures.
2) A little further back on the drawing board, Intel’s Phase-Change Memory (PCM) hopes to achieve write throughput speeds faster than NAND and with lower latency. Since PCM has no separate erase step, it chould deliver significant write performance improvement over NOR and NAND flash.
There are a few other memory technologies in the experimental stage, such as Spin Torque Transfer RAM (STTRAM) and nanomagnets, but at least for now, memristor and PCM show the greatest promise as a replacement for Flash..
More info can be found on the Storage-Brian links below: More information... More information... Brain Teaser for 05/27/2011This week’s Storage Brain Teaser will require you to think outside the box. Modern data storage devices contain the world’s history via binary text, mathematics and images. Before computers, this information was housed in written books and artwork. Before books and artwork, well that’s the subject of this week’s teaser. What is the world’s oldest known source of written record? i.e. what is the world’s oldest storage device? Answer: We had quite a few responses this week, but none of them quite hit the mark. Cave wall paintings and etchings, while the earliest form of recorded history, cannot be considered storage devices (nor can the “pocket”.)
Credit for the earliest storage device goes to the Kish Tablet, discovered in Iraq and thought to be the world’s oldest known written document. Dated to 3500 BC, this Sumerian limestone tablet has survived for over 5,500 years and although readable is composed of undeciphered pictographs, Later, the Sumerians used clay tablets that were scribed in Cuneiform using reeds. These clay tablets still exist today after 5,000 years and were the basis of the World’s first libraries.
For more info, click the Wikipedia links below… More information... More information... Brain Teaser for 05/20/2011Solid State Disk (SSD) is growing in popularity as prices drop and capacities climb. SSD’s can be built using DRAM or Flash memory modules, but the vast majority of SSD’s today use Flash memory. Today’s teaser deals with the origins of Flash. What company invented Flash and how did it get its name?
Answer: Flash memory was invented by Dr. Fujio Masuoka while working for Toshiba circa 1980. The name "flash" was suggested by Dr. Masuoka's colleague, Mr. Shoji Ariizumi, because the erasure process of the memory contents reminded him of a camera's flash. Brain Teaser for 05/13/2011This week’s brain teaser is one that everyone in the data storage industry should know – but hardly anyone does. Here’s the teaser: This man was a high school science teacher who invented something we are all familiar with – a way to score tests that were marked with a number 2 pencil. IBM was so impressed with him that they bought the technology and hired him. While at IBM he became known as the father of the disk drive. Who is he? Answer: Reynold B. Johnson More information... Brain Teaser for 05/06/2011In Infosmack Podcast #96, Larry twice mentioned a fundamental trait of all human beings. What was it? Answer: We are lazy. More information... Brain Teaser for 04/22/2011Today’s brain teaser is for those with a technical mind. Modern storage systems couldn’t exist today without a common language that allows storage devices to communicate with one another. This language is called SCSI, or Small Computer Systems Interface. When SCSI was developed in the 80s, interoperability between storage vendors was a great concern, so the SCSI committee adopted a set of required commands that all vendors had to strictly adhere to. These core SCSI commands were known by a 3 letter acronym, can you name the acronym and what it stood for? Answer: CCS - Common Command Set More information... Brain Teaser for 04/04/2011Diane Greene and her husband Mendel Rosenblum left UC Berkeley in 1998 and went on to create one of the most profound companies in the history of IT before being acquired and unceremoniously dumped by their parent company in 2008. After being ousted, Mendel returned to academia as a Stanford professor, but Diane mysteriously disappeared until 2010 when she re-surfaced at a Silicon Valley stealth start-up. What company did Diane and Mendel launch in 1999, and what stealth company is she involved with now?
Answer: After building VMware into an irresistible force in the industry, Diane Greene was replaced by current CEO Paul Maritz. Diane disappeared for a few years but recently surfaced with networking startup Nicira
More information... Brain Teaser for 03/11/2011As the name implies, data warehouses have a whole lot of data, which of course requires a whole lot of data management. In 1992, the world's first terabyte data warehouse system was announced. Assuming 2GB disk drives, that's a whopping 500 drives in this system. Can you name: 1) The company that needed this data warehouse? 2) The company that delivered the system?
Answer: 1) Wal-Mart and 2) Teradata
More information... Brain Teaser for 02/18/2011One of the biggest disasters in data storage history occurred in 2003 when a once high-flying SSP (storage service provider) closed its doors after burning through over $500M in investor cash. In the late 1990s, "experts" declared that SSPs would soon be raking in Billions of dollars by taking storage management headaches away from Users. Unfortunately, it was the SSPs, and their investors, that ended up with migraines as they one after another closed up shop. What was the name of the $500M SSP that imploded in 2003, and who was the ex-EMC'er who founded it and became the first CEO?
Answer: Storage Networks Inc., otherwise known as SNI. This company was a darling of dot-com era investors when ex-EMC'er Peter Bell took the company public in July 2000 at a price of $90 per share.
More information... Brain Teaser for 02/04/2011Introduced in 1984, the Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES, turns 27 this year. The NES was Nintendo's 3rd generation system, while today's Wii is the 7th generation gaming console. Both systems have internal RAM memory, but of course the memory capacity has grown over the years. What is the magnitude of onboard working memory capacity growth from the NES to the current Wii consoles. Answers should be in the form of 10X, 50X, etc.
Answer: Today's Wii (512MB) has 256,000 times more onboard working memory than the NES system of 1984 (2KB).
More information... Brain Teaser for 01/21/2011The Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP) for SANs got its start in 1988 when a consortium of vendors led by Emulex formed to develop the standard. However, in 1990, IBM thought they had a better idea and proposed an alternate standard, but it eventually failed to gain popularity. What competing SAN protocol did IBM invent?
Answer: Serial Storage Architecture (SSA)
Brain Teaser for 01/07/2011ESDI vs SCSI was not only a battle over storage communication standards but also a battle between disk storage controller companies. What two companies dominated the ESDI and SCSI host controller market in the 80s?
Answer: ESDI and SCSI host controller market was dominated in the 80s and 90s by Emulex and Adaptec
Brain Teaser for 12/23/2010What was the memory capacity in each of the Apollo 11's two guidance computers?
Answer: The computers each had 2048 words of erasable magnetic core memory and 36 kilowords of read-only core rope memory. The memory word length was 16 bits
More information... Brain Teaser for 12/16/2010How did Flash Memory get its name?
Answer: Flash memory was invented by Dr. Fujio Masuoka circa 1980. The name "flash" was suggested by Dr. Masuoka's Toshiba colleague, Mr. Shoji Ariizumi, because the erasure process of the memory contents reminded him of the flash of a camera
More information... Brain Teaser for 12/10/2010Hitachi Data Systems was an early entrant in storage array virtualization with its TagmaStore announcement in 2004. Where did the name TagmaStore get its roots?
Answer: At time of launch in 2004, HDS execs said the "TagmaStore" name comes from the Greek word "tagma," which means to put in order
Brain Teaser for 12/03/2010In 1993, Sun Microsystems released their first storage array controller. This rack-mount unit housed an internal RAID controller and 30 hot-swap drives with a whopping 31.5GB capacity. Can you name this highly successful product?
Answer: SPARCStorage Array 100 series
More information... Brain Teaser for 11/26/2010Legato released its revolutionary "Networker" product in the late 1980s. For the first time, Unix administrators had a commercial product that could automate the backup and recovery of large amounts of data. However, Networker was actually Legato's second product introduction. Their first product was also revolutionary but today is largely forgotten. Can you name it?
Answer: PrestoServe
More information... Brain Teaser for 11/19/20101) What caused disk drive outgassing?
2) What did outgassing do to effect disk drive reliability?
Answer: High temperatures can cause offtrack errors due to thermal tilt of the disk stack and actuator, or even cause head crashes due to outgassing spindle and voice-coil motor lubricants. This was a big problem in the 1990s!
More information... Brain Teaser for 11/12/2010The 3.5" disk drive is the most popular format used in enterprise storage today. What company invented this format?
Answer: A Scottish company called Rodime
More information... Brain Teaser for 11/05/2010What was the world's first random-access storage device? Answer: The Williams Tube CRT Memory Storage Unit - 1946
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