Storage Buzz, April

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!