SAN Buzz July I

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

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.

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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.

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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

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!
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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

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

Read more about this topic here.

SAN Buzz May

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:
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Implementing an IBM/Brocade SAN with 8 Gb Directors and Switches
Revised: May 30, 2008
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Implementing an IBM/Brocade SAN with Fabric Manager 5.5
Published: May 23, 2008
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Implementing an IBM/Brocade SAN
Published: April 4, 2008 ISBN: 0738485195
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IBM System Storage/Brocade Multiprotocol Routing: An Introduction and Implementation
Published: April 4, 2008 ISBN: 0738485764
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IBM/Cisco Multiprotocol Routing: An Introduction and Implementation
Published: April 23, 2008 ISBN: 0738485322
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Implementing an IBM/Cisco SAN
Revised: April 22, 2008 ISBN: 0738485241
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Cisco FICON Basic Implementation
Published: April 17, 2008 (Redpaper)

SAN Buzz April

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.

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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

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:

1. Conference and Trade show season is in full swing.
2. Analyst predictions for what's going to be hot and not in 2008 get less frequent.
3. 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:

• FCoE
• Tape Storage
• Clustered Storage