Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Storage Buzz March


Zuerst ein Hinweis für meine deutschsprachigen Leser: Das bekannte IBM Storage Kompendium meiner IBM Kollegen Kurt Gerecke und Klemens Poschke ist in einer neuen, nachgeführten Auflage erschienen: Fast 60 Jahre Speichergeschichte zum nachschlagen und staunen!

And then, there's two interesting news related to diapers, beer, and relationships. One refers to the break-up between HP and CISCO, the other one to some exciting research being done at the Zurich IBM Lab.

Storage tiering has recently become a really hot topic in the market again, mainly due to the introduction of solid-state-disk technology and the need to take maximum advantage of this (still) rather expensive type of storage. Where is should SSD be used? As a replacement for disk drives, as a less expensive type of disk-cache or maybe directly hooked to the server memory board, eliminating I/O alltogether?
After reading this article, you may want to think twice about deploying (and managing!) a tiered storage architecture.
With every new year, the demise of FC based SANs is being moved out further into the future: While initially -when the FCoE hpye first took off- 2011 was supposed to be the year of FCoE, this latest study now puts that date as far as 2013, or maybe 2014...

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

SAN Buzz, February 2010

A number of exciting storage announcements last week from IBM, read the summary here.

Most noteably the SONAS system created lots of interest. You can find details about it on IBM's storage website.

In addition, I have summarized a couple of valuable press articles about the scale-out-NAS topic for you:
  1. Computerworld
  2. DrunkenData
  3. The Register
  4. SearchStorage
  5. SFGate
  6. Storage Newsletter

Related to the ever-present cost discussions in datacenters, this article discusses the real or perceived cost advantages of FCoE.

While Hu Yoshida in his well written post asks the question you have had in your mind probably as well: "If I'm doing more with less people and disks are getting cheaper, why are my costs increasing?"

His answer to the problem is "storage virtualization" and I absolutely have to agree!