SAN Buzz December

Resuming on my cloud topic from the last post, here's a comment by Nicholas Carr (author of the book "The Big Switch") about how the current downturn seems to even affect Google's "cloudy" plans and datacenter expansion strategy: "So much for the Googley Treats".

The quarterly contest for top rankings in IDC's storage market reports for the third quarter 2008 is over and Byte&Switch reports on the verdict:

"Total disk systems capacity shipped in the quarter reached 2,170 Pbytes, up 41.7 percent from a year ago."

The hype for SSD storage seems to grow with more vendors and technologies hitting the market, thus adding to the confusion of many potential users of the new storage technology.

SNIA has recognised this and has recently launched the "Solid State Storage Initiative" (SSSI). Check their website for vendor-neutral material about the pros and cons of various SSD technologies!

What seems to become clear however is the fact, that the massive increase of harddisk capacity in the past years coupled with a relative lack of increase of performance seems to open up a perfect niche for high-performance-low-capacity SSDs in enterprise storage systems as this article explains!

And lastly, approaching the end of another year, here's an amazing website: If you want to find out about the buzz and hot topics in storage back in 2002 (or any other year back to 1949!) you'll find it here!

And if you feel nostalgic and want to have a look at a website of a long-gone company (like Veritas or McDATA) check out the wayback machine!

Enjoy!

SAN Buzz November II

I noticed some time ago that the most recent news thread from the IT and storage industry increasingly sounds like a weather forecast:
Sunny skies with clouds developing in the atmosphere during the day...
Let's all hope we don't get too much rain from all these clouds!

Actually my friend Tony Pearson has a great post on the Atmos-thing announced last week.
And if you thought the concept of cloud storage was new, check out this research paper dated from 2000: they called it OceanStore back then, but clouds and oceans both hold water and span the globe (any other similarities?).

So if you feel like storing some of your digital files and documents in the cloud today, go to the Wuala website, this Swiss startup has recently opened their service to the public. It should have been named Clouds'R'Us, because the cloud actually consists of the storage of all the participating users in this implementation. Great idea!

As you may have noticed, the rate of density increases on traditional HDDs has slowed since 2004/05 and the justification for this is documented here: A guy by the name of Mark Kryder claims that the increase in density even beats the increase on the chip side (aka Moore's Law)..or maybe not?

In any case, the age of SSDs in the enterprise seems near (IBM has coined the term SCM (storage class memory)) and here's a video which shows a possible implementation/integration of SSDs in the IBM SVC virtualization solution.

SAN Buzz November

Couple news from the HDD vs. SSD front:

Seagate announces a new 2.5 inch high-performance enterprise drive and Intel releases a first revision of NVMHCI

(another one to get used to? Stands for "Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface").

NVMHCI is a good thing as it probably will raise the awarness of the fact, that it does not make sense to use solid-state memory embedded in systems architectures and file systems which have been designed entirely around the characteristics of rotating disk drives! Read the pros and cons here!

In the storage networking realm, CISCO seems to suffer a bit under the fact that they are kind of late to the 8 Gbps Party which Brocade started some nine months ago.

Meanwhile, Qlogic silently shipped the first products with 20 Gbps ISL capability, while CISCO plans to take advantage of their recent investment in VMware by integrating their stuff more tightly with the virtualized data centers.

If our customers will have funds available to invest into these technologies in 2009 is rather uncertain at this time:

IDC takes a rather pessimistic approach, while IBM's Sam Palmisano believes that the IT Industry in general- and IBM more specifically- are well positioned to actually support a technology-fueled economic recovery.

However, I have to admit that I strongly disagree with the stated example of "Stockholm's smart traffic system" mentioned in his speech (aka road pricing): as far as I can see, this is simply another means of collecting taxes and has absolutely nothing "smart" to it!

SAN Buzz October II

For those of you who didn't get the chance to attend SNW in Dallas (like myself), here's a great link to get an overview of what was going on at the Fall 2008 conference.

See you at the SNW Europe in Frankfurt next week!?

All the latest SNIA Tutorials are available here if you want to browse thru the presentations.
Of course there was also time to relax and socialize, not sure who created this funny video!

Among other things, IBM did announce a new scale-down version of its best-selling SAN Volume Controller virtualization solution: the SVC EE (entry edition).

Much of the buzz at the conference was around solid-state-storage and FCoE as you might guess, here's a couple articles related to FCoE:
NetApp announces plans for native FCoE storage (and here)
EMC announces an FCoE switch/gateway (based on CISCO Nexus technology)
and as the third piece needed to build an FCoE infrastructure, Emulex and Qlogic both announce certification of their respective CNAs.

The conclusion from my good friend Greg Schulz at StorageIO Group is
"...Fibre Channel over Ethernet can consolidate networks".

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