Storage Buzz March

Zuerst ein Hinweis für meine deutschsprachigen Leser: Das bekannte IBM Storage Kompendium meiner IBM Kollegen Kurt Gerecke und Klemens Poschke ist in einer neuen, nachgeführten Auflage erschienen: Fast 60 Jahre Speichergeschichte zum nachschlagen und staunen!

And then, there's two interesting news related to diapers, beer, and relationships. One refers to the break-up between HP and CISCO, the other one to some exciting research being done at the Zurich IBM Lab.

Storage tiering has recently become a really hot topic in the market again, mainly due to the introduction of solid-state-disk technology and the need to take maximum advantage of this (still) rather expensive type of storage. Where is should SSD be used? As a replacement for disk drives, as a less expensive type of disk-cache or maybe directly hooked to the server memory board, eliminating I/O alltogether?

After reading this article, you may want to think twice about deploying (and managing!) a tiered storage architecture.

With every new year, the demise of FC based SANs is being moved out further into the future: While initially -when the FCoE hpye first took off- 2011 was supposed to be the year of FCoE, this latest study now puts that date as far as 2013, or maybe 2014...

SAN Buzz, February 2010

A number of exciting storage announcements last week from IBM, read the summary here.

Most noteably the SONAS system created lots of interest. You can find details about it on IBM's storage website.

In addition, I have summarized a couple of valuable press articles about the scale-out-NAS topic for you:

1. Computerworld
2. DrunkenData
3. The Register
4. SearchStorage
5. SFGate
6. Storage Newsletter

Related to the ever-present cost discussions in datacenters, this article discusses the real or perceived cost advantages of FCoE.

While Hu Yoshida in his well written post asks the question you have had in your mind probably as well: "If I'm doing more with less people and disks are getting cheaper, why are my costs increasing?"

His answer to the problem is "storage virtualization" and I absolutely have to agree!

Storage Buzz January 2010

I took a work related break to blogging. Today I am back with the firm intent to return to a regular update scheme!

The focus of my blog will slightly change to a more general view and news on storage and all the "buzzwords du jour" related to it.

One of them is certainly "Clouds" in all shapes and colors. You can test your cloud knowledge here!

A few of us, however, are convinced that the current cloud-hype will go away as it happened to similar concepts in the past. I couldn't agree more!

A very down-to-earth and proven technology got a major boost just this week when IBM Research demonstrated a new record breaking 29 billio bits per square inch of data density on a tape device.

See the video here!

If you wonder who is going to use all that capacity, check out the latest "How Much Information" report, released end of 2009.

On the business side, Oracle finalized the acquisition of Sun this week and was quick to assure their customers that they have a solid roadmap for the former STK and Sun storage products. Which remains to be seen...

The overall outlook for the 2010 storage market seems to be rather bright: An increasing number of reports indicate that the worst may be over (here and here).

Which is no surprise taking into account the steady increase of amounts of data all companies, small and large are supposed to handle and manage!

(For your reference: the IDC and Gartner numbers for Q3 2009)

Storage Buzz June I

First things first: The FCoE standard has reportedly been finalized these days and you may expect the pace of announcements in the field of "converged network" storage gear to rise for the 2nd half of 2009.

Here's what IBM's Clod Barrera has to say about FCoE.

In a related move, IBM has re-entered the networking business!

Networking products are part of our "Dynamic Infrastructure" initiative and IBM is acknowleding the fact that server, storage, and networks are all key building blocks for an IT Infrastructure and customers want to have an option to source everything from one company.

(interestingly, some of the news releases from 1999 announcing the withdrawal of IBM from the networking business are still online.)

The networking war is also heating up on the fibre channel (FC) side of the market: Brocade reportedly gained market share versus CISCO and there may be various reasons for this:

a) CISCOs strong focus on FCoE (and therefor lack of focus on 8 Gbps FC)

b) CISCOs announcement to enter the market for blade servers which lets server vendors like HP and IBM scratch their heads and think twice about partnering with CISCO.

And lastly -looking at the first quarter market numbers- the good news is that data growth is continuing despite the crisis. However, data storage revenue is declining for the first time in many years and I'm personally convinced that this fact will lead to further consolidation in the market for the rest of the year.

Storage Buzz, April

Please note that I have changed the title of this blog to "Storage Buzz" since I have increasingly been focusing on more than "storage networks" only.

Spring has arrived and I'll try to get back to a more regular schedule of updates.

I have been overwhelmed with tasks in my new role here at IBM and am slowly catching up now. Here's a rundown of some of the top news from the last couple weeks in no specific order:

The hype around FCoE seems to cool down a bit as first products enter the market this year, here's two noteworthy links:

Brocade announcing their implementation of a "top-of-rack" FCoE and FC switch and CISCO venturing into the market of bladeservers (of course with a focus on tight integration with the datacenter network and VMware (which they partially own).

SSDs enjoy an unchaged level of attention from the industry and SNIA did release a first set of materials around the topic, allowing clients to get a vendor-neutral view on the subject (presentations from SNW 2009 here).

Have you heard of Kryder's Law? Well, if not, you might want to read more about it here and learn that spinning disks will most likely be around for another couple of years at least!

And with ever more (important!) data being stored on all kind of media, it will be more important to protect/encrypt data on any storage media in the future: The largest disk drive manufacturers have just recently agreed on a TCG standard to support interoperability for encrypted devices and integration with major key management systems.

And just this week, EMC did release their first approach on building a "clustered storage system" or Virtual Matrix how they name it. See also the article on Byte&Switch.

Please note that IBM already sells iteration number XIV of a similar, revolutionary architecture!

Storage Buzz, January 2009

New year, new name! I have changed the name of this blog to represent the fact that I will be dealing with the entire storage platform in 2009 instead of "only" storage networking!

My daily job keeps me pretty busy these days, so I have to limit my blogging to an absolute minimum for the time being.

Here's one to start the year: Top Innovations of 2008!

And IBM just announced a pretty solid 2008 and a rosy outlook to 2009!

(I picked an Autralian source because two of my kids currently travel down under)

SAN Buzz December II

With the year winding down and business coming to a halt in the next days, here's my last summary of news and events which caught my attention in the last couple days.

A most blessed Christmas Season to you!

Do you really need a SAN? That's the question raised in this article by Forrester senior analyst Andrew Reichman. He concludes that with more storage-specific functions added by the application vendors, the time has come for buyers to "question the value of their SAN and consider simpler options that fit better with the applications they truly care about." Hmmm...

On the technology side, Qlogic announces availability of an 8 Gbps blade switch module for the IBM BladeCenter and HDS announces their first shot at using SSDs for their USP platform.
Like IBM, HDS has been cautious about where and how to use SSDs in the enterprise storage hierarchy, but with the current hype about the technology, it seems that you simply have to have at least one SSD option in the portfolio and this will not change for 2009!

On the industry side, Brocade did complete the acquisition of Foundry Networks this past week and posted a whitepaper about their strategy for the combined company.

The rumour mill produced a couple news items (Network World and Inquirer)about CISCO allegedly planning to enter the blade server market?

And lastly, looking forward to 2009, here's IBM Bob Moffat's "10 Reasons why IBM succeeds in 2009"!