Storage Buzz May I

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?