Storage Buzz

January

2012-01-05T03:51:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!

Let's start off the new year with some thoughts who might be driving our industry in 2012.

CNN just announced their "Four Horsemen of Tech" for 2012 which noteable inlcudes a "Horsewoman" representing a very old company as well: IBM! Can you identify the other three guys?

And for startups of the year, here's the list from the "Storage Newsletter".

December II

2011-12-09T05:23:00.000-08:00

One of the future technologies for non-volatile storage is perceived to be the "racetrack" memory, developped in the IBM labs.
Looks like we are another step closer to making this a feasible alternative to Flash-Memory (as its used today in SSD devices).
See the press release and the detailled comment from Computerworld.

On a funny note, ome reading here about China and the Chinese from my favorite Insdustry Analyst and Frequent Traveler Steve D. at ESG.

December

2011-12-05T05:22:00.000-08:00

To start with today, let's resume the cloud topic from my last post.

Here's another great summary (by Steve Duplessie) on how, where, and when cloud storage and cloud services may make sense:

"Why do people use these services? Because A: doing it yourself SUCKS, and B: the cost of letting someone else deal with it is at the inflection point–it’s becoming inarguable when you know that A: it sucks to do yourself and B: it’s now cheaper to do it elsewhere."

The current flooding in Thailand is a terrible event and our hearts go out to the people effected and those working to resolve it!

The flooding and its consequences will affect the HDD industry in many ways for the next couple of months as this Computerworld article lines out:

"In the first half of 2011, Thailand accounted for 40% to 45% of worldwide hard disk drive production! As of early November, nearly half of Thailand's production was directly affected by the flooding."

An intersting move from NetApp to add another flavor of scale-out NAS to their product lineup. According to this article here, they plan to bundle LUSTRE, the open source high performance file system, with their E-Series arrays (aka LSI!) to create a scale-out NAS system for the HPC market.

And lastly, the Q3 2011 IDC numbers are in: the worldwide disk market grew to $7.6 Mio in revenue and capacity shipped increased by 31% (y/y) to reach 5.4 EB (Exabytes) or 5429 PB (Petabytes) for the quarter!

Here's some additional analysis and graphs for these numbers!

November

2011-11-08T05:07:00.001-08:00

October is missing in my posts - I just realize. It has been a very busy time, but fortunately also including some days off with my family!

So it's time to catch up on some recent developments in the storage industry... or should I say cloud industry? The picture here (taken in Lisbon) kind of reminds me of the cloud value proposition: only have parts of the building and use the cloud as the "roof"?!

Having said that: how would you like unlimited cloud storage for 10$ a month? Well, there's a company offering just this. They claim that by deduplicating and compressing data, they are able to offer such an attractive price.

One of the major "events" in October was sadly the passing of Steve Jobs who leaves a big void at Apple (I'm convinced!). One of his quotes back from 1993 especially struck me:
"Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me." [The Wall Street Journal, May 25, 1993]"
In his very special way, he has probably achieved both things in his life! (there's a couple other quotes from him here).

And then - in one way or another kind of related to Steve and his company - here's a couple other interesting articles:
A short history of social media
do you remember Geocities or Friendster?
A project to make available the archives of the Montreux Jazz Festival
1.2PB of storage will hold 40 years of performances at the Festival!
The Ten Commandements of the American Religion
and Rule #1 is: Own a Home!
147 companies own everything
Three systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ) have taken a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide and analyzed all 43,060 transnational corporations and share ownerships linking them.

In another indication of the heavy market dominance of VMware in the hypervisor market, they now think about introducing a new concept and way to provision storage to VM hosts: getting away with LUNs and /or NFS and introducing what they call "storage containers". Even if this new concept will never hit the market, I am personally convinced that whoever offers the best integration with VMware will be succesful in that storage segment in the future!

And lastly, one comment about FcoE ("why FCoE is dead but not burried yet") and a 55th Birthday! RAMAC was introduced some 55 years ago, the first "hard disk drive" as we know it.

September II

2011-09-09T02:18:00.000-07:00

Exciting news from the hard-disk vendors this week: it seems that we are about to start the rollout of the 4 TB disk drive options.
The one example on the left originates from Seagate, but Hitachi actually was a day early to announce their first 1 TB platter.

The HDD industry overall did again very well in Q2: Over 167 Mio drives sold in just three months (2Q 2011), so SSD technology does not really seem to have a real impact on the HDD market so far, my impression is that SSDs are mainly used in new market segements today (like the Apple iPad) and most PCs and laptops on the shelves of electronis retailers are obviously still based on HDD storage.

This is even more true for the enterprise storage market, see the Q2 tally from IDC here.
My opinion: as soon as more then 50% of PCs and Laptops sold will be SSD based, we will probably be at a price point where using SSDs in large-scale enterprise storage systems becomes economically feasible.

Eventually -in a couple years- HDDs will be replaced be the "next big thing" in storage anyway, this may be "Racetrack" technology developped by IBM.

September

2011-09-02T05:37:00.000-07:00

I'm back from vacation, business trips and other summer fun! A lot going on in the worldwide economy and politics these days, not so much on the storage front though.

Let me summarize some of the key news there from the past couple weeks:

Lots of hype still around FCoE, here's an excellent summary of where the industry is today. I've had quite a few discussions around this topic recently and my personal opinion is this: unless the (FCoE) industry manages to get to an accepted standard where clients will be able to connect FCoE native (storage) devices and FCoE switches without being forced to juggle dozens of interop matrices, FCoE will be going nowhere!

Take iSCSI as an example: iSCSI storage connects to any standard IP network and switch and clients don't have to first verify if device XYZ supports switch ABC.

Even more hyped is the "Big Data" theme: Read in this article why "there's really no such thing as big data"!

By the way: one of the books I took along to the beach this summer is "Innovators Dilemma", I can highly recommend it, it has lots of examples and details about the hard-disk industry; to make the case why big companies ("incumbents") usually fail to spot new market niches and disruptive technologies.

Talking about "big": While others talk about big data, IBM actually builds big data, read here!

And to close on a sad note: HP seems really lost these days, the article here in WSJ says it all.

June III

2011-06-16T01:57:00.000-07:00

Happy Birthday, IBM!

Here's a great clip about the Centennial from IBM Switzerland

(in German),

or the full-length worldwide version here as well as the official "100 Year" press release.

June II

2011-06-10T06:04:00.000-07:00

IDC has published their analysis of the worldwide Q1 2011 storage market and they find, that not only did the total shipped (disk storage) capacity increase by 46% , but also revenue grew by 13%.
After all, there might be some truth to the repeated claims that the area of ever cheaper storage will slowly come to an end? Or as ESG's Steve Duplessie brilliantly puts it: "The next storage war will be economic-lead".

Contributing to that fact may also be that parts of the market (and thus the industry) seem to be moving to the more expensive SSD and even PCM (phase-change memory) technology (away from classic hard-disk drives).
Mostly for performance reasons and forced by the need for real-time data analytics - Big Data is the buzzword of the moment here!

So an exciting new industry is being established with lots of startups (like Violin) and venture-capital involved. Watch this space!

And if you felt like there was too much "cloud" in our industry recently, here's someone who certainly agrees: Tom Trainer describes why "monolithic scale-out-NAS" is not what a real storage cloud should be: "True cloud storage is a disruptive paradigm shift" as he states!

June

2011-05-27T00:38:00.000-07:00

Three updates today about SSD, FCoE, and unstructered data (aka Big Data).

Let's start with the SSD news: You probably know that a brand new SSD device behaves much different than a used one, this is related to the fact that write operations cannot be done "in place" and thus there is a considerable amount of "garbage collection" going on once the device has been used to capacity. The SNIA now has published what I believe is the first set of specs to perform standardized (and thus comparable) measurement of solid-state disk performance.

Read this excellent article in Computerworld here.

Also related to SNIA: Rob Peglar, a well known SNIA representative recently took over the CTO position at Isilon/EMC.

Read here what he has to say about "Big Data", why he thinks deduplication is not a useful technology for "Big Data" (agree!) and why disk is a superior archive media for "Big Data" (disagree!).

And lastly, here's a great presentation from the May "Interop" conference in Las Vegas about the convergence of data center networks: "FCoE vs. iSCSI: Making the Choice"

May

2011-05-11T05:27:00.001-07:00

Did you ever wonder which are the biggest storage companies in terms of revenue? Across all segments and technologies, just sheer size?

Well, here's that list and surprisingly, the "component" companies like Seagate, WD or SanDisk have much higher revenues than the "system" vendors like Netapp and HP.

With the notable exception of EMC obviously.

However, there are signs that the hard-disk vendors might be loosing some of their share of the storage industry in the next couple years: The industry is on the verge of completely redefining storage tiers with the advent of affordable SSD technology (for primary, active data), high capacity HDDs (for backup and inactive data) and huge capacity tape (for archive and last-resort backup data).

Even though we had some bad news about "sanitization" of SSDs published recently. So when moving to an all-SSD storage environment, clients may well want to think about encrypting that data first!

And lastly (and probably much welcome to connect high-performance SSD systems in the future) Brocade has announced their first 16 Gbps SAN gear last week! Find the product details here.

April II

2011-04-19T05:01:00.001-07:00

...and then there were three: Seagate to acquire Samsungs HDD business

(and YES, I'm old enough to remember that famous album from 1978).

1978 was also the year when IBM stopped marketing the IBM 2314 direct access storage facility (aka disk system).

April

2011-04-15T04:40:00.000-07:00

Lots of activities to cover from the last couple of weeks. Let me start with the most recent ones and then working backwards in time.

Spring time means a lot of industry events and conferences going on, here's the agenda and presentation links from the SNW last week in Santa Clara, CA.

IBM's own EMEA Technical University took place in Prague last week as well and one thing I noticed was the very frequent mentioning of "Hadoop" in a couple of storage related sessions. This got me interested and here's a couple of links about it:

From the enterprise storage forum and Wikipedia, from the cloudera company site and if you want to learn even more, here's a book for you!

Here's one (and another one) reason why we need these file systems which can handle massive amounts of data and parallel access to run data analytics against them.

On the M&A front, there was a surprising move by Netapp to acquire LSI Engenio, here's some potential reasons behind that move.

Less surprising probably was the move of Western Digital to acquire HGST (the disk manufacturing arm of Hitachi).

I guess the hard disk industry is starting to feel the squeeze from future "storage class memory" implementations like SSDs and (further out) potentially "racetrack memory".

And finally a look into exciting new startups in the realm of storage,

I think the exciting times in the storage industry are far from over yet!

This is also reflected in the 2010 market numbers and trends as collected and summarized by IDC here:

Total disk storage systems capacity shipped reached 5,127 Petabytes, growing 55,7% year-over-year.

February

2011-02-10T06:39:00.000-08:00

Todays 100-story is around IBMs invention of the "Magnetic Hard Disk" back in 1956.

Check out the details and background here.

February

2011-01-27T06:18:00.001-08:00

Celebrating 100 Years of IBM this year!

Check out the first one in a series of Centennial Films.

January II

2011-01-10T06:20:00.000-08:00

Above: IBM's first patent issued in 1911 ... and a record number of 5896 patents for IBM last year!

January 2011

2011-01-03T04:26:00.001-08:00

Welcome to 2011! Did you know what 2003, 2011 and 2017 have in common?

They are all prime numbers! There was no prime number year between 1951 and 1973 and this period was probably also the longest period of economic growth in the 20th century, so my theory is .... (no, I don't want to go there!)

To summarize the old year and start off the new one, here's a couple articles for you to be prepared:

An acquisition overview from last year (and the years past): We are counting 57 mergers and acquisitions in the storage industry in 2010 which is up from 2009 but still not even close to the peak of 105 back in 2006. The article also has a nice list of who bought whom in 2010.

Then there is the preview of the top storage trends in 2011 ("will we have Storage-in-a-box") and an outlook on what the key players may be up to in 2011 ("will Oracle buy Netapp?").

And from the technology perspective, here's a great paper from IBM Research on the "Trends in Storage Technology" which goes way beyond 2011.

December III

2010-12-21T00:55:00.000-08:00

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!

December II

2010-12-13T01:23:00.000-08:00

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"!

December I

2010-12-07T00:50:00.000-08:00

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.

November I

2010-11-19T05:50:00.000-08:00

When Facebook is down, our world comes to a virtual halt...it seems. This is what happened recently and here's the official answer about the reasons behind the outage. Facebook -as other companies- is struggling to contain and manage their data growth.

As this Gartner study shows, data growth (and related topics like archiving, data reduction techniques, storage consolidation) will remain IT's biggest challenges moving into 2011!

Moving from the future to the past: Linear-tape-open (aka LTO) celebrated its 10-year anniversary this month! LTO is also part of my past in the storage industry: I had the pleasure to initiate and co-author the very first release of the IBM LTO Redbook back in 2000! And after a quick research, some websites with that very first release of the book did surface!

The technology behind this very succesful architecture has not changed, the capacity certainly has: LTO 1 had a native capacity of only 100 GB, today, LTO 5 can store 1'500 GB und the LTO Roadmap shows LTO 8 with a planned capacity of 12'800 GB!

On the Microsoft side of the industry, there was recently an idea to repeat a procedure initiated in the eighties in the phone industry: Back then, splitting up AT&T into the so-called "Baby Bells" did not really improve service or costs for the consumers in the long run. Read here about a proposal to break up Microsoft into a number of "Baby Bills".

In terms of mergers and acquisitions, the past weeks brought the acquisition of 3PAR thru HP and Isilon thru EMC. What's next? Compellent (CML), Coraid, CommVault (CVLT), Riverbed (RVBD)?

Related to Scale-Out NAS, at IBM we do our own development (as you may remember, we already sell the SONAS product since about 10 months) and have recently published very detailed material on how we plan to grow this architecture into an even more scalable and flexible cloud offering which can span across the globe seamlessly. Details about "Panache" are available on the IBM Research website here.

And lastly, the 16 Gbps Fibre Channel standard is ready to roll: FCIA has announced the completion of the new standard and we expect products to hit the market in first half of 2011. Interesting detail is, that the 16 Gbps transmission will be based on a new encoding scheme: 8 Gbps was based on 8b/10b enncoding while 16 Gbps will use 64b/66b, so less overhead and much more usable bandwidth for data!

Major drivers for deployment of 16 Gbps technology will be server virtualization (hundreds of servers in one system!) as well as use of SSD technology in storage arrays.

Happy Thanksgiving!

October

2010-10-06T23:06:00.000-07:00

Major storage announcements today from IBM! Find all the details about this exciting launch on the IBM website.

September III

2010-09-27T07:29:00.000-07:00

Breaking News: IBM to acquire BNT!

September II

2010-09-27T04:36:00.000-07:00

Here's a quick roundup of the most interesting headlines in storage since Europe returned from summer vacation about three weeks ago.

The favorite subject of the news press and bloggers these days seems to be Oracle so these are the assorted news:

Mark Hurd leaves HP, joins Oracle.

Sam Palmisano comments on Oracle.

Does Oracle plan to buy Netapp?

Details on Oracle's Exalogic storage.

If you have not heard about the upcoming v4.1 NFS (network file system) here's an excellent summary of why this will be important.

On the networking side, both -Brocade and CISCO- announced new steps towards a converged network for the datacenter:

CISCO announces an advanced data center strategy inlcuding new Nexus converged switches featuring unified ports which support traditional Ethernet as well as Fibre Channel (FC) and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).

Brocade releases a network monitoring product ("Network Advisor") built to enable control and management for converged networks (IP, Ethernet, Fibre Channel) with one single tool.

IDC adds the tab for us and finds out, that during the first half of 2010 the storage industry returned to a healthy growth in terms of revenue and capacity growth (compared to a weak first half of 2009 of course).

Read the details and rankings here.

Looking into the distant future of storage, IBM Research issued a press release around studies done in their labs about "how long a single atom can hold information". Possible implications of this amazing research are outlined here.

And lastly here's a very funny clip about the daily routine of doing conference calls in a global economy!

Storage Buzz September

2010-09-01T04:52:00.000-07:00

Summer is officially over, it's back to the office and end of sleeping in and travelling. Before I left, I came across this article from Steve Duplessie and I could not agree more! So I have tried to focus on really important things the past couple weeks (like holding up redwood trees...).

Here's a summary of what went on in the storage realm while I was gone:

An increasing amount of signs that the increase of aerial density for magentic discs eventually will hit a ceiling.
Probably related to that, an increased focus on offline and tape media. In this case Oracle agreeing with IBM on the importance of tape and rolling out the roadmap for their Tape and Library products inherited from Sun and STK.
Steady progress and advancements in the area of FCoE and 10 Gbit/s Ethernet.
Most recent acquisition object of desire: 3PAR. It will be interesting to see who ends up at the altar with the company who "invented" thin provisioning.
And while Isilon is not (yet) being taken over, this company may be one of the future targets of acquisition plans.
IBM takes over NAS data compression specialist Storwize and announces availability of V2 of its key management product TKLM (Tivoli Key Lifecycle Manager) which now supports the KMIP standard.
Moshe Yanai, the founder and father of XIV off to new endeavors.

Storage Buzz July II

2010-07-09T04:40:00.000-07:00

Couple of useful articles this week on data protection: IBM's Cindy Grossman as well as ESG's Steve Duplessie (based on a market study) comfirm that tape will have its place in data storage in the future!

Another proof that not everything is going to be "cloud", "virtual", and "solid-state" in the future is the shutdown of EMC's Atmos Cloud Service established only a year ago. Even EMC does not seem to have identified a viable business model for cloud storage yet, folks like to know where stuff is and like to have some amount of control over their data I would assume.

Magnetic disk technology further improves capacity and Seagate will ship their first 3 TB drive priced at 250 USD very soon.

And lastly, former Brocade CEO Greg Reyes was sentenced to 18 months in jail after another trial in San Francisco last week. As you may guess, the storage community has very mixed feelings and emotions about this trial as you can read here.

Storage Buzz July

2010-06-25T03:15:00.000-07:00

Rumours about a potential acquisition of Storwize, a US/Israel-based company, through IBM have been buzzing around the market recently. Storwize has been partnering with IBM for a while and their "RACE" (random access compression engine) based solution has been tested by IBM (see the joint whitepaper here). For IBM's newly found focus on file storage solutions, the acquisition could make a lot of sense and would nicely complement the block-storage ProtecTIER solutions.

Coming from the same geographical region, startup Anobit has announced plans to build enterprise class SSD storage based on the lower-cost MLC (multi-level-cell) SSD technology. If successful, this technology could actually speed up replacement of high-performance Fibre Channel and SAS drives with SSD based drives in enterprises. The Storage Magazin June issue had a couple of useful articles around the HDD vs. SSD topic and summarizes the status of the discussions pretty well.

And lastly, if you follow the "Fussball-Weltmeisterschaft", here's the most comprehensive overview tool by far!

Storage Buzz June III

2010-06-10T07:12:00.000-07:00

Strange World these days: A storage company announces networking architectures and a networking company reveals NAS products:

Read here about the details of Brocade One and visit Amazon to order your next NAS system from CISCO!

Storage Buzz June II

2010-06-04T07:33:00.000-07:00

Looks like our industry has finally turned the corner, here's the quarterly IDC report for worldwide external storage revenues (Press release):

Two facts are certainly noteworthy:

a) The capacity sold is back to a "healthy" +50% range growth year-over-year with worldwide shipments of 3400 Petabytes.

b) We have been expecting and forecasting huge growth in unstructered and NAS data - well it is showing in the latest report: The NAS market grew a remarkable 44% y/y!

Storage Buzz June

2010-05-27T23:38:00.000-07:00

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.

Storage Buzz May II

2010-05-20T04:55:00.001-07:00

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.

Storage Buzz May I

2010-05-18T05:35:00.000-07:00

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?

Storage Buzz April

2010-04-22T06:34:00.000-07:00

April was a big month for IBM Storage, here's an excellent summary of all the exciting news.

Storage Buzz March II

2010-03-12T05:01:00.000-08:00

As the snow is slowly melting in my neighborhood, the economy seems to be slowly recovering as well, one immediate sign is the latest IDC report on the storage market:

Q4 in 2009 was reported to have shown the first y/y growth since Q3 2008 and the amount of Petabytes shipped grew 34% y/y.

Some other comments are almost overly optimistic, but the good news is: The (spending) freeze finally seems to be over!

Another development this week worthwhile noting is the breakup between Oracle/Sun and HDS: As Hu Yoshida outlines in his post, the two companies will go separate ways. So obviously the question arises: Who will be able to take advantage of this new situation in the market?

Storage Buzz March

2010-02-24T23:48:00.000-08:00

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...

SAN Buzz, February 2010

2010-02-16T06:50:00.000-08:00

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:

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!

Storage Buzz January 2010

2010-01-29T01:07:00.000-08:00

I took a work related break to blogging. Today I am back with the firm intent to return to a regular update scheme!

The focus of my blog will slightly change to a more general view and news on storage and all the "buzzwords du jour" related to it.

One of them is certainly "Clouds" in all shapes and colors. You can test your cloud knowledge here!

A few of us, however, are convinced that the current cloud-hype will go away as it happened to similar concepts in the past. I couldn't agree more!

A very down-to-earth and proven technology got a major boost just this week when IBM Research demonstrated a new record breaking 29 billio bits per square inch of data density on a tape device.

See the video here!

If you wonder who is going to use all that capacity, check out the latest "How Much Information" report, released end of 2009.

On the business side, Oracle finalized the acquisition of Sun this week and was quick to assure their customers that they have a solid roadmap for the former STK and Sun storage products. Which remains to be seen...

The overall outlook for the 2010 storage market seems to be rather bright: An increasing number of reports indicate that the worst may be over (here and here).

Which is no surprise taking into account the steady increase of amounts of data all companies, small and large are supposed to handle and manage!

(For your reference: the IDC and Gartner numbers for Q3 2009)

Storage Buzz June I

2009-06-15T04:15:00.001-07:00

First things first: The FCoE standard has reportedly been finalized these days and you may expect the pace of announcements in the field of "converged network" storage gear to rise for the 2nd half of 2009.

Here's what IBM's Clod Barrera has to say about FCoE.

In a related move, IBM has re-entered the networking business!

Networking products are part of our "Dynamic Infrastructure" initiative and IBM is acknowleding the fact that server, storage, and networks are all key building blocks for an IT Infrastructure and customers want to have an option to source everything from one company.

(interestingly, some of the news releases from 1999 announcing the withdrawal of IBM from the networking business are still online.)

The networking war is also heating up on the fibre channel (FC) side of the market: Brocade reportedly gained market share versus CISCO and there may be various reasons for this:

a) CISCOs strong focus on FCoE (and therefor lack of focus on 8 Gbps FC)

b) CISCOs announcement to enter the market for blade servers which lets server vendors like HP and IBM scratch their heads and think twice about partnering with CISCO.

And lastly -looking at the first quarter market numbers- the good news is that data growth is continuing despite the crisis. However, data storage revenue is declining for the first time in many years and I'm personally convinced that this fact will lead to further consolidation in the market for the rest of the year.

Storage Buzz, April

2009-04-15T03:28:00.000-07:00

Please note that I have changed the title of this blog to "Storage Buzz" since I have increasingly been focusing on more than "storage networks" only.

Spring has arrived and I'll try to get back to a more regular schedule of updates.

I have been overwhelmed with tasks in my new role here at IBM and am slowly catching up now. Here's a rundown of some of the top news from the last couple weeks in no specific order:

The hype around FCoE seems to cool down a bit as first products enter the market this year, here's two noteworthy links:

Brocade announcing their implementation of a "top-of-rack" FCoE and FC switch and CISCO venturing into the market of bladeservers (of course with a focus on tight integration with the datacenter network and VMware (which they partially own).

SSDs enjoy an unchaged level of attention from the industry and SNIA did release a first set of materials around the topic, allowing clients to get a vendor-neutral view on the subject (presentations from SNW 2009 here).

Have you heard of Kryder's Law? Well, if not, you might want to read more about it here and learn that spinning disks will most likely be around for another couple of years at least!

And with ever more (important!) data being stored on all kind of media, it will be more important to protect/encrypt data on any storage media in the future: The largest disk drive manufacturers have just recently agreed on a TCG standard to support interoperability for encrypted devices and integration with major key management systems.

And just this week, EMC did release their first approach on building a "clustered storage system" or Virtual Matrix how they name it. See also the article on Byte&Switch.

Please note that IBM already sells iteration number XIV of a similar, revolutionary architecture!

Storage Buzz, January 2009

2009-01-21T01:17:00.001-08:00

New year, new name! I have changed the name of this blog to represent the fact that I will be dealing with the entire storage platform in 2009 instead of "only" storage networking!

My daily job keeps me pretty busy these days, so I have to limit my blogging to an absolute minimum for the time being.

Here's one to start the year: Top Innovations of 2008!

And IBM just announced a pretty solid 2008 and a rosy outlook to 2009!

(I picked an Autralian source because two of my kids currently travel down under)

SAN Buzz December II

2008-12-23T00:18:00.000-08:00

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"!

SAN Buzz December

2008-12-08T03:51:00.000-08:00

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!

SAN Buzz November II

2008-11-25T05:12:00.000-08:00

I noticed some time ago that the most recent news thread from the IT and storage industry increasingly sounds like a weather forecast:
Sunny skies with clouds developing in the atmosphere during the day...
Let's all hope we don't get too much rain from all these clouds!

Actually my friend Tony Pearson has a great post on the Atmos-thing announced last week.
And if you thought the concept of cloud storage was new, check out this research paper dated from 2000: they called it OceanStore back then, but clouds and oceans both hold water and span the globe (any other similarities?).

So if you feel like storing some of your digital files and documents in the cloud today, go to the Wuala website, this Swiss startup has recently opened their service to the public. It should have been named Clouds'R'Us, because the cloud actually consists of the storage of all the participating users in this implementation. Great idea!

As you may have noticed, the rate of density increases on traditional HDDs has slowed since 2004/05 and the justification for this is documented here: A guy by the name of Mark Kryder claims that the increase in density even beats the increase on the chip side (aka Moore's Law)..or maybe not?

In any case, the age of SSDs in the enterprise seems near (IBM has coined the term SCM (storage class memory)) and here's a video which shows a possible implementation/integration of SSDs in the IBM SVC virtualization solution.

SAN Buzz November

2008-11-14T04:18:00.000-08:00

Couple news from the HDD vs. SSD front:

Seagate announces a new 2.5 inch high-performance enterprise drive and Intel releases a first revision of NVMHCI

(another one to get used to? Stands for "Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface").

NVMHCI is a good thing as it probably will raise the awarness of the fact, that it does not make sense to use solid-state memory embedded in systems architectures and file systems which have been designed entirely around the characteristics of rotating disk drives! Read the pros and cons here!

In the storage networking realm, CISCO seems to suffer a bit under the fact that they are kind of late to the 8 Gbps Party which Brocade started some nine months ago.

Meanwhile, Qlogic silently shipped the first products with 20 Gbps ISL capability, while CISCO plans to take advantage of their recent investment in VMware by integrating their stuff more tightly with the virtualized data centers.

If our customers will have funds available to invest into these technologies in 2009 is rather uncertain at this time:

IDC takes a rather pessimistic approach, while IBM's Sam Palmisano believes that the IT Industry in general- and IBM more specifically- are well positioned to actually support a technology-fueled economic recovery.

However, I have to admit that I strongly disagree with the stated example of "Stockholm's smart traffic system" mentioned in his speech (aka road pricing): as far as I can see, this is simply another means of collecting taxes and has absolutely nothing "smart" to it!

SAN Buzz October II

2008-10-20T05:42:00.000-07:00

For those of you who didn't get the chance to attend SNW in Dallas (like myself), here's a great link to get an overview of what was going on at the Fall 2008 conference.

See you at the SNW Europe in Frankfurt next week!?

All the latest SNIA Tutorials are available here if you want to browse thru the presentations.
Of course there was also time to relax and socialize, not sure who created this funny video!

Among other things, IBM did announce a new scale-down version of its best-selling SAN Volume Controller virtualization solution: the SVC EE (entry edition).

Much of the buzz at the conference was around solid-state-storage and FCoE as you might guess, here's a couple articles related to FCoE:
NetApp announces plans for native FCoE storage (and here)
EMC announces an FCoE switch/gateway (based on CISCO Nexus technology)
and as the third piece needed to build an FCoE infrastructure, Emulex and Qlogic both announce certification of their respective CNAs.

The conclusion from my good friend Greg Schulz at StorageIO Group is
"...Fibre Channel over Ethernet can consolidate networks".

SAN Buzz October

2008-10-03T06:06:00.000-07:00

Here's the highlights from the last two weeks in storage:
One (unrelated to storage!) was for sure a trip last week aboard a 1939 Ju-52 in the Swiss Alps, this airplane is (almost) completely free of computer technology and the flight attendant actually encouraged us to use the cell phones during take off and landing ;-)

IBM continues to invest in future storage technology and has announced a joint venture with Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) to advance research and development of future solid-state memory products based on "racetrack memory".

You have certainly noticed that recently, many companies try to get into the "datacenter" market, a segment owned mainly by the big computer companies like IBM, HP and others in the past. The growing importance of the networks (and the internet), and the fact that todays datacenters have become a very complex collection of dozens of platforms, operating systems, and protocols open up the opportunity and needs for "datacenter operating systems" and "converged networks". CISCO's John Chambers talks in this interview with Forbes magazine where he sees CISCO's place in the datacenter (and why IBM might object to those plans).

On the technology side, I found two interesting posts about SAS (serial attached SCSI) which is slowly gaining traction in many aspects: One is the next SAS standard to be finalized in the near future, the other one is this press release about IBM shipping SAS drives for its entry-level BladeCenter S.

SAN Buzz September III

2008-09-22T06:48:00.000-07:00

This week, the solid-state storage technology receives the official blessing from SNIA: Launching the SSSI (solid state storage initiative), the industry association aims to:

Educate the industry on solid state storage to make it clear where this technology is best suited.
Develop standards for solid state storage to allow for better and more interoperable implementations.
Perform market outreach in the US and around the world to enable the highest penetration of solid state storage products possible.

Read a well-written assessment of the initiative here.

VMware used its VMworld event last week to outline some of the focal topics for their 2009 roadmap and much of it is actually related to a better and tighter integration of storage and storage networks with the VMware environments.

On the FCoE front, Qlogic this week announced the successful "plugfest-certification" of their converged network adapter (CNA) at a recent FCIA-sponsored event.

Lastly, both Fibre Channel vendors announced new products as well: CISCO adds 8 Gbps technology to their MDS line of products (obviously admitting to the fact, that FCoE is not going to take over the SAN market for 2008 and 2009!) while

Brocade rolls out a fibre channel encryption blade together with their "converged" SAN management tool DCFM (Datacenter Fabric Manager) which is eventually going to replace both, the Brocade Fabric Manager (FM) as well as the SANnavigator/McDATA based EFCM.

SAN Buzz September II

2008-09-08T00:00:00.000-07:00

Big Information Infrastructure rollout today from IBM:

Today, IBM announces a series of new products and solutions to help clients manage their enterprise information.
They can be summarized as CARS:
Information:

SAN Buzz September

2008-09-05T04:19:00.000-07:00

Exciting days and weeks:

Google celebrates its 10th anniversary by releasing an own Webbrowser, leaving the industry scratching their heads about the underlying strategy and plans. These days also mark the 6th anniversary of CISCO entering the SAN market. Read an excellent analysis of what CISCO achieved during that time and where they might have done better.

The battle in the storage industry about SSDs heats up with IBM publishing the results of a lab-test, using SVC with integrated SSD (cache, sort-of). Which in turn led to some interesting posts from companies who take a different approach.

The magnetic-media side of the business meanwhile is still doing great as IDC reports in the latest release of worldwide external storage market numbers: "Total disk storage systems capacity shipped in Q2 reach 1,777 petabytes, growing 43.7% year over year"

If you want to be personally involved with many of the players in this industry and want to build and own opinion about exciting technologies like SSD, data de-duplication, FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) among many others, you should absolutely plan to attend the upcoming SNW (Storage Networking World) conference in Frankfurt, Germany.

SAN Buzz August

2008-08-12T07:13:00.000-07:00

Back from the beach today and already great news to report:

IBM announced XIV storage system today, a grid-based enterprise-class storage!

SAN Buzz July II

2008-07-22T00:32:00.000-07:00

Today, "major turmoil" -as previewed in my previous post- actually happens: Brocade announced their intent to acquire Foundry Networks, based in Santa Clara, CA.

What I instantly like about them is the name of their products: Big Iron!

I'm not familiar with that company, so here's the first set of opinions about Brocade's move:

Los Angeles Times

Information Week

Mercury News (San Jose)

CRN

Steve Duplessie's Blog

In any case, to me this looks like a big endorsement for FCoE from the biggest Fibre Channel switch vendor!

SAN Buzz July I

2008-07-14T04:02:00.000-07:00

Summer and vacation time is approaching quickly, so this will most likely be the only entry for the current month, unless -of course- major turmoil is going to happen like -say- CISCO buys EMC...

Along the same lines and topics, I came accross this interview with CISCO CEO John Chambers and he actually and openly addresses some of the questions around their storage partners (OSMs) and VMware.

And to round up the virtualization topic, here's a great piece on how integration and connectivity to storage plays an increasingly important role in VMware's strategy.
While Microsoft's competing offer -Hyper-V- obviously still seems to lack some of the storage capabilities of rival VMware.

From the IBM/Brocade SAN segment of the market, here's a link to the newest IBM SAN Newsletter.

Watch out for "application- or file-aware storage" hype?!
Well, not sure this is going to take off, but I've seen that term poping up more frequently than it used to a couple of months ago and not only from Pillar Data Systems, the company who claims to actually have implemented it:
Check out these references here, here, and here.
After all, it's not new, as this paper from the stone-age of storage (anno 1999) prooves!

No blog entry in 2008 without FCoE news:
A very excited article ("no need to wait") about the technology from BNT (the blade-networking spinoff of Nortel) and one more cautious (some may say "intentionally dampening the expectations") statement from Brocade here.

And lastly a couple of miscellaneous news from around IT:

IBM and ETHZ (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) plan to build a joint nanotechnology center on the IBM campus in Zurich/Rueschlikon: "The new nanotechnology center will occupy nearly 1,000 square meters of cleanroom space dedicated to research projects, such as carbon-based materials, nano-photonics, spintronics, nanowires, and tribology."
Does "NAS" stand for "never accesses storage"? Fact is that clients are increasingly lost in heaps of filers and unstructered data and many will find, that most of that data is rarely or never used. Time to think about data classification!

SAN Buzz June III

2008-06-23T02:09:00.000-07:00

Summer has finally arrived in Zurich, so time to relax and enjoy some time away from work at the lake, at the pool or barbecue.

*
From the last two weeks of storage news, two areas stood out as far as I'm concerned:

1) I couple of news and releases around solid state disk and 2.5 inch disk drives, both potentially taking over some of the enterprise storage market in the long run.

2) Some interesting mid-year summaries on trends and hot topics in the industry for 2008 as well as a look back on what was hot in back in 2004.

And lastly, here's a well written article on converged fabrics and what role Ethernet, InfiniBand, and Fibre Channel might play in the data center of the future.

SAN Buzz June II

2008-06-06T05:20:00.000-07:00

Gartner and IDC have added up the disk storage systems numbers for the first quarter of 2008 and they both agree, that the market grew at around 10% in revenue year-over-year and at over 50% in capacity:
Total disk storage systems capacity shipped during the quarter reached 1642 PB (petabytes) according to IDC.
To give you a feeling about that number, check out Wikipedia!
*
On the other side, the "information producing" end of the industry, there was this study done by the University of Berkeley in 2000 and 2003 titled "How much Information". Now the UCSD (SanDiego) has initiated an effort to recreate that report for the end of our decade.
After all, Youtube, Facebook, as well as iTunes and other Web 2.0 applications did barely exist in 2003!

SAN Buzz June

2008-06-05T06:34:00.000-07:00

The Return of Water-cooled Processors!

In a press release today, IBM Research Zurich announced, that they have successfully "demonstrated a prototype that integrates the cooling system into the 3-D chips by piping water directly between each layer in the stack."

Combining water and electricity may sound very scary at first, but in fact, water cooling right at the source of the heat -inside the processor- may be the only way to actually solve the colling challenges of high-performance, high-density chip designs.

Check out the full details here.

After all, IBM have used water cooling already way back in the 80s, as a look into the IBM archive reveals.

On the storage side, there is an intense battle (of words, mostly) going on related to the relevance and potential of Flash Storage (SSDs) to address enterprise storage needs: While the HDD market will definitely move to 2.5 inch based drives in the near future for that segment, I still tend to believe that the enterprise SSD market will remain a niche for the foreseable future, mainly for three reasons:

Current SSD technoolgy does not allow single bit updates, so any write operation is quite complex because entire blocks of data have to be deleted and rewritten, so SSDs are by their very attributes mainly to be positioned for read operations.
While the price level for consumer amounts of SSD (like the 10, 20 or 30 GB used in iPods, cell phones and laptops) is slowly reaching levels at which consumers are willing to actually pay the uplift for reduced weight, the increased battery life and robunstness, SSD at enterprise amounts of a couple hundred GB is still more than 10 times more expensive than HDD.
And lastly, one of the biggest advantages of SSD, its robustness and resilience against mechanical shocks don't really count in a glass-house environment.

SAN Buzz May

2008-05-07T00:01:00.000-07:00

My friends over at the ITSO have been very productive during the past couple of months and have churned out a number of excellent books. Here's a list of the latest material related to storage networking:
*
Implementing an IBM/Brocade SAN with 8 Gb Directors and Switches
Revised: May 30, 2008
*
Implementing an IBM/Brocade SAN with Fabric Manager 5.5
Published: May 23, 2008
*
Implementing an IBM/Brocade SAN
Published: April 4, 2008 ISBN: 0738485195
*
IBM System Storage/Brocade Multiprotocol Routing: An Introduction and Implementation
Published: April 4, 2008 ISBN: 0738485764
*
IBM/Cisco Multiprotocol Routing: An Introduction and Implementation
Published: April 23, 2008 ISBN: 0738485322
*
Implementing an IBM/Cisco SAN
Revised: April 22, 2008 ISBN: 0738485241
*
Cisco FICON Basic Implementation
Published: April 17, 2008 (Redpaper)

SAN Buzz April

2008-04-29T03:23:00.000-07:00

Time for an update: I'm currently in Moscow where I gave an update on recent storage networking standards at the local IDC conference. The translator has left and since most of the afternoon presentations are going to be in Russian (and I don't understand any Russian so far), there's some time for informal work.

In summarizing the past couple of weeks, there was a bunch of news around the SNW 2008 in Orlando, much of it related to FCoE and clustered storage concepts. Here's a couple of useful writeups:

CISCO buys Nuova Systems and introduces first (pre-standart) FCoE hardware.

The Enterprise Systems Journal featured a nice article about how to position this new unified networking standard. So FCoE is definitely an important trend to watch and the value proposition around consolidating server interconnects looks very promising!

The second hot segment is clustered storage in all shapes and forms: Infostor had an excellent piece on this new architecture and Xiotech invented the term ISE (Intelligent Storage Element) to describe their new solution based on a very modular approach to combine hard drive resources to form a resilient, scalable and flexible storage system. Not sure if this is supposed to bring back memories of the ICE cube project done at IBM Almaden a couple years ago.

And despite of all the current hype around solid state drives (SSD), the good old mechanical harddrive is still the single most important building block for our entire industry!

SAN Buzz March

2008-03-26T04:17:00.000-07:00

Returning to the office after the Easter break more felt like new year this time: with temperatures hovering around Zero (Celsius) and snow piling up in the streets, spring seems like months away.

However, you can tell it's spring time by a couple of signs in our industry:

Conference and Trade show season is in full swing.
Analyst predictions for what's going to be hot and not in 2008 get less frequent.
The storage vendors release their spring collections of gear and hype.

Ontop of this, I wanted to share a couple of very well written acrticles related to three storage topics which I believe will be important and relevant for the rest of the year:

SAN Buzz February I

2008-02-12T01:42:00.001-08:00

Exciting news from IBM today: The IBM System Storage™ SAN768B is the next generation high-performance, high-density and high-availability SAN fabric backbone designed to be the foundation for large enterprise-class infrastructure simplification.
It provides up to 512 wire-speed, non-oversubscribed 8 Gbps ports in a single rack (or 768 ports slightly oversubscribed at 1.5:1) and interoperates with the m-type family (McDATA) of IBM directors.
For features and details refer to the IBM Announcement Letter.
*
A green touch for the platform is provided with the new SAN Cabinet containing Intelligent Power Distribution Units (iPDUs) which are designed to measure and monitor energy consumed by the attached products.

SAN Buzz January III

2008-01-28T02:20:00.000-08:00

The latest hot news comes from the (storage) networking folks at 170 West Tasman Drive: CISCO did announce their Nexus platform this week (included on the CISCO webiste is a nice overview clip).
A good analyisis can be found here and here.

*
They refer to this as data center 3.0 platform, a unified network platform for the datacenter. Important to note however that this is all future promises for the time being: no Fibre Channel cards or support have been announced at this time.

SAN Buzz January II

2008-01-23T05:08:00.000-08:00

This weeks news come from our friends at 1745 Technology Drive in San Jose:
Brocade did announce their first new director platform after the completion of the McDATA acquisition.
Although I didn't have a chance to see the product myself so far, the specs and pictures all indicate that it is basically an evolution of the Brocade 48000 director which has been around for some time.
Interestingly enough, they re-implemented an idea originally used in an Inrange Director (2001 timeframe) called XCA (extensible core architecture) which now goes by the name of ICLs (inter-chassis links) in 2008: Build high-port count SAN units by connecting multiple (two in Brocades' case) directors' backplanes. On second thought, this shouldn't be a big surprise: Inrange was acquired by CNT which was acquired by McDATA which was acquired by Brocade last year...
And due to fibre channel addressing limitations, Brocade in its 2008 implementation has to maintain the individual "domains" in the connected directors, so technically, there is a "hop" between the upper and lower unit.
The DCX highlights:

native interoperability with McDATA and Brocade platforms
Vitual fabrics (management zones)
integrated routing capability for each port
first 8 Gbps product on the market (8 Gbps blades will also be made available for the Brocade 48000)

More to follow as details become available...

SAN Buzz January I (2008)

2008-01-03T06:28:00.001-08:00

The new year takes off with some great news from our storage division here at IBM: On January 2nd, IBM has acquired XIV Information Systems, a privately-held storage solutions development company based in Tel Aviv, Israel.

XIV Information Systems, including its development activities, engineers, employees and technologies, will become part of STG’s System Storage business unit and will remain in Israel.

Regarding the name of the company, the Jerusalem Post has a hint as to where it originally came from.

This is a great move for IBM STG in a couple different ways:

a) The architecture used in XIVs products ("Nextra") is nothing less than revolutionary and clearly shows the way how "information management" solutions will be built in the 21st century: "Nextra is a SAN storage system built around next generation cluster technology to provide dynamic scale, auto-tuning and self-healing to the data layer. The architecture is based upon commodity components to provide lower cost." (Quote from the brand new ESG white paper)

b) The chairman of the board of XIV, Moshe Yanai, is a very well known person in the industry: While at EMC in the 1990s, Yanai served as the vice president of engineering and is widely credited as being the inventor of that company’s flagship Symmetrix storage array.

An excellent piece of analysis and summary can be found here and here!

SAN Buzz for December I

2007-12-07T05:47:00.000-08:00

Holiday Season is coming up, and for those of you still searching for a gift for someone in the storage industry, here's my choice!

In the SAN realm, here's what I found most noteable during the last couple of weeks. I was traveling quite a bit, so may have missed out on a few new hot topics, but I don't think I missed a major new trend during that time.

Byte&Switch brought us a very useful summary of future storage interconnects and IBM -at the same time- did announce a whole new set of solutions around intreconnects in a blade server environment:
The IBM BladeCenter Open Fabric Manager provides I/O virtualization and can help cut cost and complexity for clients through its open architecture. IBM BladeCenter Open Fabric Manager supports the complete range of Ethernet and Fibre Channel technologies.
*
And while Brocade did announce FY 2007 results which came in as expected, sentencing for their former CEO Greg Reyes is still pending: the date has been postponed indefinitely and as the local San Jose newspaper Mercury News reports, support was building up for Reyes in the industry with hundreds of supporters writing to district Judge Charles R. Breyer who -according to Fortune magazine- found that "..the government had failed to quantify any amount of loss that can be attributed to Reyes’ conduct.”
*
Lastly, here's a list of the most unusual data disaster stories of 2007, hope yours is not on the list: "Discovering ants had taken up residence in his external hard drive, a photographer in Thailand took the cover off his computer and sprayed the interior with insect repellent. ...
The ants didn't make it, and neither did the drive"

SAN Buzz October II

2007-10-24T06:06:00.000-07:00

This week, IBM had some major storage announcements, including new functions and solutions for almost all storage products accross the portfolio:
Virtualization, Disk Systems, and storage solutions targeted at SMBs.

Most important on the SAN-side are the IBM announcements of the CISCO MDS 9134 and 9222i as well as the 18/4 FCIP director blade.
These products complete CISCOs push into the switch market and leave customers with a choice of vendors across the entire IBM SAN portfolio!
*
Here's some great coverage about a recent IBM Analyst meeting where STG Executives outlined the IBM storage strategy for 2008 and beyond.
*
Searchstorage had this excellent article about SAN Best Practices and points out (among seven other potential pitfalls) to:
Understand the functional limitations of your switches (#3):
"Today, switches incorporate features that go beyond simply managing network communication, such as data migration and storage virtualization, which are common in the large director-class switches. The need for intelligent features, such as these, is frequently the motivation for switch upgrades and replacements, and storage administrators should consider intelligent features and their role in the data center"
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So, talking about intelligent switches, Brocade did use the SNW conference in Dallas and their recent Customer Event in Las Vegas to demo 8 Gbps SAN gear and outline their DCF (data center fabric) strategy.
Read comments here and here.
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And with the end of the year coming closer, here's more IT predictions for 2008: Gartner's top technology predictions for 2008
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My friends over at the IBM ITSO also have been very productive lately and here's two redbooks related to storage networks and IBM BladeCenter that you may find useful:

Implementing Cisco InfiniBand on IBM BladeCenter
Published: October, 2, 2007
and
Implementing the QLogic Intelligent Pass-Thru Module for IBM BladeCenter
Published: October, 2, 2007
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Last but not least -talking about Blades- here's my personal Blade-favorite for 2008: The Honda Fireblade!

SAN Buzz October

2007-10-02T08:49:00.000-07:00

Here's a great piece on virtualization comparing appliance vs. network/switch based virtualization.

At a recent analyst meeting, Brocade executives did outline future strategies and talked about how they see the duopoly-SAN-market.

You can find the complete slides here and a good comment on the presented ideas and statements here.

Do you have hundreds, maybe thousands of SAN ports in your enterprise? And store TBs and maybe PBs of information? Then maybe you can be a contender in the "Worlds biggest SAN" contest!

SAN Buzz September II

2007-09-21T04:27:00.000-07:00

The only IBM announcement we had in the SAN space during the last couple of weeks is the Brocade 10 Gbps and iSCSI blades for the SAN256B Director (aka Brocade 48000), details here.

However, it was a very busy two weeks in terms of IBM Storage Research announcements, there were two major press releases and interestingly, the first one (on Aug. 30) was related to a technology which probably is another 15 years away until we see real products, whereas the second one (Sept, 11) seems to have the potential for a midterm implementation as a product:

IBM's SINGLE-ATOM STORAGE BUILDING BLOCK and how

IBM is to redefine memory architecture: Racetrack Memory

In the arena of good old magnetic disk technology, there was interesting news as well. For one, Seagate announced that it will add encryption capability to its desktop line of disk drives by the end of this year (2007 that is).

And as always around the end of summer, IDC is adding up the numbers from the industry and published the sales ranking for external disk subsystems for the second quarter 2007.

At the other end of the fibre cable, Dell'Oro is busy adding up the SAN ports numbers and causes Brocade to claim a 73% market share for the first half of 2007.

To round things off on a funny note here's the Top 10 SAN Stories this year so far. They include topics like:

Storage virtualization reaches the "Trough of disillusionment",

Cisco goes for the jugular, and BrocData, so check it out!

The Encyclopadia of Business Clichees shows the most abused (buzz)words and if I tell you the "push the envelope" is ranked as #15, you'll certainly want to see what's number 1!

Have fun!

SAN Buzz September I

2007-08-28T05:01:00.000-07:00

Green storage seems to be all the buzz lately, here's two contributions I did like a lot:
One is a recent article in ESG on green storage,
The picture on the left should remind us of the fact that some data simply is not worthwhile storing at all!

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Another area of intense hype and activities is the file area network or FAN.

This article summarizes what the perceived business benefits of this methodologies and products are.

SNIA has established a workgroup to help clients navigate this space and has recently posted a very comprehensive definition of what a FAN is supposed to be:

A namespace-based network-oriented infrastructure for files that includes a decoupling layer which separates logical file access from physical file location. This decoupling layer enables a variety of services (e.g., replication and migration) to be applied to files and filesystems.

And a couple of various news from last week:

Qlogic switches have been recently certified with the IBM SVC.

FCoE compromise reached between Brocade and CISCO
but..
no compromising with the U.S. government: Reyes guilty:
..while outside the courts, the (marketing)battle continues:

Brocade says CISCO is blocked

SAN Buzz for August

2007-08-27T06:08:00.000-07:00

Industry News:
Although SANs are pervasive in larger enterprises, many small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have yet to take the plunge and are still tethered to direct-attached storage (DAS) configurations. Those companies are missing out on a number of benefits, including efficient management of data and storage resources, cost- effective capacity planning, improved asset utilization, and reduced risk of data loss-whether it’s a Fibre Channel SAN or an iSCSI SAN.
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It’s time to take a little time out of the day and have some fun. Network World has once again collected a series of funny videos about storage technology:
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Have a look at the new generation of small form factor enterprise drives:
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Comeback of solid state storage?

There was a number of noticeable announcements and news during the months of summer which seem to indicate that solid state storage is slowly preparing its comeback into the enterprise realm.

Here's a couple of examples:
Terabyte solid-state storage disk array

Solid-state storage for IBM BladeCenter
and -on a more funny note- the motorcycle enthusiasts Flash Memory (picture above!)
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With a slightly wider scope and looking into the future beyond 2007, here's a very interesting article about data storage after spinnning disks:

Here's how it works.