Storage Buzz June

As we all know, the use of computing systems is no longer limited to what we traditionally call a "computer" but we create, manipulate, and retrieve data on phones, TVs, kitchen appliances and GPS devices among many others. Computers control and manage buildings, planes, trains, and cars. And computers can and will be "hacked"!
And that's where this very funny but also scary story starts: Car manufacturers have used for a couple of years a technology dubbed "CAN" (car area network) to control the dozens or hundreds of sensors, motors, and systems of a modern car.
Read here what could happen if somebody tampers with your car's electronic systems!
Note that the car shown here is in "PARK" while the speedometer indicates 140 MPH!

IBM Redbooks are a unique institution in the industry and have helped thousands of customers in the past decades to understand the how's and why's of IBM systems and products. Watch this funny video and hear why we love Redbooks!

And lastly, an update to the Fibre Channel market and the current trends in that segment of the industry as CISCO and Brocade announced their quarterly revenue numbers and are disputing who won and who lost market share.

Storage Buzz May II

Solid-state-disks are right at the top of the hype-cycle these days as the recent study published here shows.

And another article highlights, how the basics behind new storage tiers and how to use them have remained unchanged since the inception of memory: The famous Five-Minute-Rule.

Yet, there might be another good reason -besides performance- to look into SSD technology: Yelling at them does not harm data access!

For hard-disk drives, this is not the case as this funny video shows: Shouting at the poor drives can cause major I/O disruption. This is not a joke, and the IEEE actually did a paper to scientifically document errors caused be vibrations.

Storage Buzz May I

In an effort to contribute to the "greening" of storage, here's a couple noteworthy news from the last couple of weeks. As the picture here indicates, our greenest approach may not always exactly be what our customers and users like!
EPA - the US "environmental protection agency"- has started a project to develop product specifications for data center storage.

Computerworld's comment on the activity highlights the fact, that measuring standardized power consumption on storage systems will be
a difficult task, taking into account the complex internal architectures of storage systems and the multitude of optimizing tasks being performed under the hoods (e.g. defragmentation or deduplication).

While IBM and other vendors have announced LTO 5 and extended the roadmap for LTO up to generation 8 (with a quoted native capacity of 16 TB per cartridge!), Oracle went out of their way to convince Sun/STK customers that they will be continuing to develop and support the former STK tape products. The bad news: it will be more expensive and less flexible - as this article here outlines!

And lastly: more happy times ahead for the storage industry: IDC estimates that data created in 2020 will be around 35 zettabytes - an amazing number! Well, if today's situation is any indication, most of that data will not be created but duplicated or copied, not much of creativity around here!

Finally, if you think you hear lots of news and messages about FCoE but don't see many real-life implementations: you may be correct. Is FCoE overhyped?

Storage Buzz April

April was a big month for IBM Storage, here's an excellent summary of all the exciting news.

Storage Buzz March II

As the snow is slowly melting in my neighborhood, the economy seems to be slowly recovering as well, one immediate sign is the latest IDC report on the storage market:

Q4 in 2009 was reported to have shown the first y/y growth since Q3 2008 and the amount of Petabytes shipped grew 34% y/y.

Some other comments are almost overly optimistic, but the good news is: The (spending) freeze finally seems to be over!

Another development this week worthwhile noting is the breakup between Oracle/Sun and HDS: As Hu Yoshida outlines in his post, the two companies will go separate ways. So obviously the question arises: Who will be able to take advantage of this new situation in the market?

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!