SAN Buzz October

Here's the highlights from the last two weeks in storage:
One (unrelated to storage!) was for sure a trip last week aboard a 1939 Ju-52 in the Swiss Alps, this airplane is (almost) completely free of computer technology and the flight attendant actually encouraged us to use the cell phones during take off and landing ;-)

IBM continues to invest in future storage technology and has announced a joint venture with Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) to advance research and development of future solid-state memory products based on "racetrack memory".

You have certainly noticed that recently, many companies try to get into the "datacenter" market, a segment owned mainly by the big computer companies like IBM, HP and others in the past. The growing importance of the networks (and the internet), and the fact that todays datacenters have become a very complex collection of dozens of platforms, operating systems, and protocols open up the opportunity and needs for "datacenter operating systems" and "converged networks". CISCO's John Chambers talks in this interview with Forbes magazine where he sees CISCO's place in the datacenter (and why IBM might object to those plans).

On the technology side, I found two interesting posts about SAS (serial attached SCSI) which is slowly gaining traction in many aspects: One is the next SAS standard to be finalized in the near future, the other one is this press release about IBM shipping SAS drives for its entry-level BladeCenter S.

SAN Buzz September III

This week, the solid-state storage technology receives the official blessing from SNIA: Launching the SSSI (solid state storage initiative), the industry association aims to:

• Educate the industry on solid state storage to make it clear where this technology is best suited.
• Develop standards for solid state storage to allow for better and more interoperable implementations.
• Perform market outreach in the US and around the world to enable the highest penetration of solid state storage products possible.

Read a well-written assessment of the initiative here.

VMware used its VMworld event last week to outline some of the focal topics for their 2009 roadmap and much of it is actually related to a better and tighter integration of storage and storage networks with the VMware environments.

On the FCoE front, Qlogic this week announced the successful "plugfest-certification" of their converged network adapter (CNA) at a recent FCIA-sponsored event.

Lastly, both Fibre Channel vendors announced new products as well: CISCO adds 8 Gbps technology to their MDS line of products (obviously admitting to the fact, that FCoE is not going to take over the SAN market for 2008 and 2009!) while

Brocade rolls out a fibre channel encryption blade together with their "converged" SAN management tool DCFM (Datacenter Fabric Manager) which is eventually going to replace both, the Brocade Fabric Manager (FM) as well as the SANnavigator/McDATA based EFCM.

SAN Buzz September II

Big Information Infrastructure rollout today from IBM:


Today, IBM announces a series of new products and solutions to help clients manage their enterprise information.
They can be summarized as CARS:
Information:

• Compliance
• Availability
• Retention
• Security

SAN Buzz September

Exciting days and weeks:

Google celebrates its 10th anniversary by releasing an own Webbrowser, leaving the industry scratching their heads about the underlying strategy and plans. These days also mark the 6th anniversary of CISCO entering the SAN market. Read an excellent analysis of what CISCO achieved during that time and where they might have done better.

The battle in the storage industry about SSDs heats up with IBM publishing the results of a lab-test, using SVC with integrated SSD (cache, sort-of). Which in turn led to some interesting posts from companies who take a different approach.

The magnetic-media side of the business meanwhile is still doing great as IDC reports in the latest release of worldwide external storage market numbers: "Total disk storage systems capacity shipped in Q2 reach 1,777 petabytes, growing 43.7% year over year"

If you want to be personally involved with many of the players in this industry and want to build and own opinion about exciting technologies like SSD, data de-duplication, FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) among many others, you should absolutely plan to attend the upcoming SNW (Storage Networking World) conference in Frankfurt, Germany.

SAN Buzz August

Back from the beach today and already great news to report:

IBM announced XIV storage system today, a grid-based enterprise-class storage!

SAN Buzz July II

Today, "major turmoil" -as previewed in my previous post- actually happens: Brocade announced their intent to acquire Foundry Networks, based in Santa Clara, CA.

What I instantly like about them is the name of their products: Big Iron!

I'm not familiar with that company, so here's the first set of opinions about Brocade's move:

Los Angeles Times

Information Week

Mercury News (San Jose)

CRN

Steve Duplessie's Blog

In any case, to me this looks like a big endorsement for FCoE from the biggest Fibre Channel switch vendor!

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!