Tuesday, December 23, 2008

SAN Buzz December II















With the year winding down and business coming to a halt in the next days, here's my last summary of news and events which caught my attention in the last couple days.

A most blessed Christmas Season to you!

Do you really need a SAN? That's the question raised in this article by Forrester senior analyst Andrew Reichman. He concludes that with more storage-specific functions added by the application vendors, the time has come for buyers to "question the value of their SAN and consider simpler options that fit better with the applications they truly care about." Hmmm...

On the technology side, Qlogic announces availability of an 8 Gbps blade switch module for the IBM BladeCenter and HDS announces their first shot at using SSDs for their USP platform.
Like IBM, HDS has been cautious about where and how to use SSDs in the enterprise storage hierarchy, but with the current hype about the technology, it seems that you simply have to have at least one SSD option in the portfolio and this will not change for 2009!

On the industry side, Brocade did complete the acquisition of Foundry Networks this past week and posted a whitepaper about their strategy for the combined company.

The rumour mill produced a couple news items (Network World and Inquirer)about CISCO allegedly planning to enter the blade server market?

And lastly, looking forward to 2009, here's IBM Bob Moffat's "10 Reasons why IBM succeeds in 2009"!

Monday, December 8, 2008

SAN Buzz December

Resuming on my cloud topic from the last post, here's a comment by Nicholas Carr (author of the book "The Big Switch") about how the current downturn seems to even affect Google's "cloudy" plans and datacenter expansion strategy: "So much for the Googley Treats".

The quarterly contest for top rankings in IDC's storage market reports for the third quarter 2008 is over and Byte&Switch reports on the verdict:
"Total disk systems capacity shipped in the quarter reached 2,170 Pbytes, up 41.7 percent from a year ago."

The hype for SSD storage seems to grow with more vendors and technologies hitting the market, thus adding to the confusion of many potential users of the new storage technology.
SNIA has recognised this and has recently launched the "Solid State Storage Initiative" (SSSI). Check their website for vendor-neutral material about the pros and cons of various SSD technologies!
What seems to become clear however is the fact, that the massive increase of harddisk capacity in the past years coupled with a relative lack of increase of performance seems to open up a perfect niche for high-performance-low-capacity SSDs in enterprise storage systems as this article explains!

And lastly, approaching the end of another year, here's an amazing website: If you want to find out about the buzz and hot topics in storage back in 2002 (or any other year back to 1949!) you'll find it here!

And if you feel nostalgic and want to have a look at a website of a long-gone company (like Veritas or McDATA) check out the wayback machine!
Enjoy!