Tuesday, December 21, 2010

December III

Facebook as seen from the orbit! An amazing idea and picture! Check out the details here!
And if you are interested in a few more details about Facebook's storage infrastructure, read this post and technical paper.

New exciting developments on the side of the basic building blocks of any storage system: The HDDs and SSDs storing our data.
Hitachi delivers a new areal density record for HDDs with an amazing 636 Gbits per square inch and IBM announces its first MLC (multi-level-cell) SSD drives for enterprise storage use.

TRILL and converged networking news from IBM fellow blogger Tony Pearson who reports from the Data Center 2010 Conference in Las Vegas and Network Computing editor Mike Fratto, who summarizes his thoughts about CISCO's FabricPath implementation.

And lastly, two more articles about 2011 trends:
The "searchstorage.com" predictions of hot storage technologies and one more article about the fact that RAID will soon have to be replaced with other technologies to prevent data loss in entperprise storage systems.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Monday, December 13, 2010

December II

Next in line of storage startups to be acquired: Compellent!?

A very interesting Gartner study finds that "introducing a second networking vendor will reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) for most organizations by at least 15%-25% for a five-year time frame".

In the nearby IBM Zurich Research Lab, the new Nanotechnology Center will soon be opened, visit this site here for detailed information and read why "noise-free labs" and "clean rooms" are needed for nanotech research.

And with the year 2010 coming the an end very soon, this is the time for the "best of" and "worst of" lists, here is the "Top Ten Data Disasters"!

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

December I


Browsing thru the latest "Top 500" list of Supercomputers, I noticed that the type of interconnect technology used is still shifting towards Infiniband: currently the statistics show a total of 43% of all sites using this technology (only topped by Ethernet at 46%).

I would be really surprised if the next list due in Spring 2011 will not show Infiniband as the most used interconnect?
Even though there will be only two major vendors left: Qlogic and Mellanox.

On the storage side, IDC shows a very healthy growth in the external disk market with an amazing Netapp gaining share from almost everybody else. Will they be able to keep the momentum in 2011? I personally think so, but maybe not as an idenpendant company? Where they certainly excel is in terms of close integration with VMware and this will be a key factor for success next year and beyond as Chris Mellor outlines here: Watch this space!

Robin Harris' observations are along the same lines, although he starts his argument from a "processor technology" point of view: Is the industry going to hit "Moore's Wall"?

But even though we will not see faster processors being roll out at the same pace we have been used to in the last thirty years, there seems to be room for growth in terms of faster connections between processors: basically replacing electronic communication with optical links inside the systems (see picture).
Read the IBM Research press release here.

The HDD industry (and I mean HDD, not SSD!) at least seems to have more years of double-digit density increases ahead, these two articles (one, two) show how "microwaved disks" will allow dense data packaging.