SAN Buzz September I

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.

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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

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.