June

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

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.