March

Let me summarize what I felt was the most interesting news and articles since we started 2012:

Windows 8 will be out later this year and Microsoft is working on new concepts of managing pools of storage, referred to as "Storage Spaces". Read details here.


For those, who do not want to manage their own storage or backup data, Amazon has started to offer backup options with their S3 cloud offering: "Amazon promised its gateway would let you upload data to its cloud securely and also provide them with cost effective and low-latency back up and rapid disaster recovery."



While Infiniband is getting more traction as an intra-systems connectivity method with many storage vendors, Qlogic has decided to sell off their Infiniband business to Intel. Which means, that there are now only two Infiniband vendors left in the market. Intel and Mellanox.

Im terms of storage media, the article here raises some valid concerns about the future viability of SSDs as a basis for enterprise storage systems: "While the density of SSDs grows and the cost per gigabyte shrinks, everything else about them is poised to get worse."
So we may be ready to use a new proposed candidate for ultra-dense and cost efficient storage: The 12-atom storage.


And lastly about Big Data: If you are like me and ever wondered what the Elephant/Hadoop has to do with big data, here's an excellent little video from IBM Research: Big Data and Hadoop in 15 minutes!
And because big data requires big disks and big disks have their unique challenges with legacy RAID technology, IBM is working on new declustered RAID architectures, a software RAID implementation of redundant data blocks across dozens to hundreds of HDDs (or SSDs for that matter).