Tuesday, April 29, 2008

SAN Buzz April


Time for an update: I'm currently in Moscow where I gave an update on recent storage networking standards at the local IDC conference. The translator has left and since most of the afternoon presentations are going to be in Russian (and I don't understand any Russian so far), there's some time for informal work.
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In summarizing the past couple of weeks, there was a bunch of news around the SNW 2008 in Orlando, much of it related to FCoE and clustered storage concepts. Here's a couple of useful writeups:

CISCO buys Nuova Systems and introduces first (pre-standart) FCoE hardware.
The Enterprise Systems Journal featured a nice article about how to position this new unified networking standard. So FCoE is definitely an important trend to watch and the value proposition around consolidating server interconnects looks very promising!

The second hot segment is clustered storage in all shapes and forms: Infostor had an excellent piece on this new architecture and Xiotech invented the term ISE (Intelligent Storage Element) to describe their new solution based on a very modular approach to combine hard drive resources to form a resilient, scalable and flexible storage system. Not sure if this is supposed to bring back memories of the ICE cube project done at IBM Almaden a couple years ago.


And despite of all the current hype around solid state drives (SSD), the good old mechanical harddrive is still the single most important building block for our entire industry!