Thursday, May 27, 2010

Storage Buzz June



As we all know, the use of computing systems is no longer limited to what we traditionally call a "computer" but we create, manipulate, and retrieve data on phones, TVs, kitchen appliances and GPS devices among many others. Computers control and manage buildings, planes, trains, and cars. And computers can and will be "hacked"!
And that's where this very funny but also scary story starts: Car manufacturers have used for a couple of years a technology dubbed "CAN" (car area network) to control the dozens or hundreds of sensors, motors, and systems of a modern car.
Read here what could happen if somebody tampers with your car's electronic systems!
Note that the car shown here is in "PARK" while the speedometer indicates 140 MPH!

IBM Redbooks are a unique institution in the industry and have helped thousands of customers in the past decades to understand the how's and why's of IBM systems and products. Watch this funny video and hear why we love Redbooks!

And lastly, an update to the Fibre Channel market and the current trends in that segment of the industry as CISCO and Brocade announced their quarterly revenue numbers and are disputing who won and who lost market share.

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Storage Buzz May II


Solid-state-disks are right at the top of the hype-cycle these days as the recent study published here shows.

And another article highlights, how the basics behind new storage tiers and how to use them have remained unchanged since the inception of memory: The famous Five-Minute-Rule.

Yet, there might be another good reason -besides performance- to look into SSD technology: Yelling at them does not harm data access!

For hard-disk drives, this is not the case as this funny video shows: Shouting at the poor drives can cause major I/O disruption. This is not a joke, and the IEEE actually did a paper to scientifically document errors caused be vibrations.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Storage Buzz May I

In an effort to contribute to the "greening" of storage, here's a couple noteworthy news from the last couple of weeks. As the picture here indicates, our greenest approach may not always exactly be what our customers and users like!
EPA - the US "environmental protection agency"- has started a project to develop product specifications for data center storage.

Computerworld's comment on the activity highlights the fact, that measuring standardized power consumption on storage systems will be
a difficult task, taking into account the complex internal architectures of storage systems and the multitude of optimizing tasks being performed under the hoods (e.g. defragmentation or deduplication).

While IBM and other vendors have announced LTO 5 and extended the roadmap for LTO up to generation 8 (with a quoted native capacity of 16 TB per cartridge!), Oracle went out of their way to convince Sun/STK customers that they will be continuing to develop and support the former STK tape products. The bad news: it will be more expensive and less flexible - as this article here outlines!

And lastly: more happy times ahead for the storage industry: IDC estimates that data created in 2020 will be around 35 zettabytes - an amazing number! Well, if today's situation is any indication, most of that data will not be created but duplicated or copied, not much of creativity around here!

Finally, if you think you hear lots of news and messages about FCoE but don't see many real-life implementations: you may be correct. Is FCoE overhyped?