July

It's about time to resume blogging and edit an update to my Blog. I have been "out of IT" for a few month - between Jobs - and now back to the grind.

One of my off-IT activities: Travel Maui

Good thing is that I realized during my time off: there's plenty of great things to do and think outside of IT; sad thing is, I also realized that only in IT, I have enough marketable skills to be able to pay my bills.
So back to IT business...
Topic today is pretty straightforward. Cloud and Flash!
I think those are pretty much the buzzwords that, as someone looking into our industry in summer 2014 would realize, are discussed most frequently.

Now looking at these trends and the technologies cooking in the labs, I've come to the conclusion that the two can be combined in what I believe to be a true statement:
"By 2020, all data will be either stored on Flash or in the Cloud"
There's a couple reasons why I think this statement may become true, listed below are a couple market and technology trends from the last couple weeks which seem to point into that direction.
But the very basic physical reason for it is "latency": Response time for any IO from the cloud is always measured in milliseconds (at least - try a PING if you don't agree) while response time for any IO from a Flash System is always measured in microseconds. Means that Flash will always sit either in the server or right next to it (next like: a couple meters away)!

Let's start with Flash: See these two great articles about function and design of all-flash arrays  (by George Crump of Storage Switzerland) vs. advantages of hybrid storage arrays (by HDS CTO Hu Yoshida). And then add this news from the Samsung lab (Samsung being the #1 provider of NAND Flash) about first shipments of 3D Flash.

On to the Cloud: As the Register article here states: "CIOs will likely increasingly say: dump the data center hardware ship and ship the data up into the cloud."
A couple vendors actually announced functions and plans to that end in the past couple weeks: Netapp ties in with the Microsoft Azure cloud (more details here);
while mighty EMC announced (among a flood of other solutions, plans, products, and the intend to acquire Twinstrata) the availability of a cloud gateway option for the new VMAX3.

As discussed above, cloud data storage will most likely not be based on relatively expensive and fast Flash technology for the years to come. The most obvious candidate for efficient, cheap and reliable cloud storage is rotating disks - HDD. And a second, surprising -but also likely candidate- is good old Tape!
In case you missed the May announcement about IBM's 154TB-Tape demo: Listen to the details here!

April

Well, some of you know that I'm on a two month sabbatical now - away from my previous job at IBM.
So I have not been following the storage market very closely these days - but have focused on other (more?) important things in life - like mountain biking and enjoying hikes with my family.

The great thing is that we had a beautiful spring this year in Zurich with lots of sunshine and warm weather, as you can see in the weather report for March here!

Still, there was a couple things that caught my attention and they are around SDN (software defined networking): While I was doing online research and was trying to figure out, where the industry is going in relation to this topic, I found a great series of blog posts and articles over at the InformationWeek site (thanks folks!).

I have summarized these for you:
First, start here with an industry overview and download the SDN market report (login required).
Then, you can read a detailed analysis by vendor - what their strategies and solutions are:
Part 2: CISCO, Arista and HP
 Details for CISCO ACI (application centric infrastructure), part 1 and part 2.
Part 3: Juniper, Brocade, Dell
Part 4: VMware, Avaya

March

Two major topics today: Object storage and cloud. And YES, I believe the two are in fact very closely related: Objects (defined as unstructured and permanent, unchanged data) seem to be by far the best fit for data to be stored in the cloud!
To get us started - and if your are like myself still trying to come to grips with the object Hype - here's a great Object Storage 101 for your reference (thanks George Crump!)

And Chris Mellor -over at the Register- points out that object storage is ".. headed towards mainstream status, with ViPR, Black Pearl and EVault leading the way. Others, though, held back. As of the year end, we saw IBM doing nothing much with objects, NetApp apparently standing still with its StorageGRID, and Dell exiting the field." Read the details here!

Now, expanding the focus and looking beyond objects and storage only, using cloud services may not be the nirvana many CxO's are dreaming about: Forbes recently had a great article about this and made the point very well by listing the following checkmark items for cloud management:

This means that at any moment a CIO must be able to answer the following questions:

1. Are all the applications and services in our control running properly?
2. Are all the applications and services running in the cloud or as SaaS running properly?
3. Is there a network problem in the network under our control?
4. Is there a network problem in the public Internet?
5. Is there a network problem in the network of the cloud or SaaS provider?

I like numbers 2. and 4.!

Still, cloud becomes more popular and less expensive by the week - as the most recent price war between the cloud "behemoths" Amazon and Microsoft shows:

 



February

Two articles on the long-running competition between FC and FCoE caught my attention this past weeks:
The major argument for high-speed 16 Gbps native FC connections these days are high-performance (and more importantly: low-latency) SSD and Flash storage systems: Evaluator Group recently did a benchmark to compare the two technologies with a series of state-of-the-art SSD Systems and here's what they found:
"The resulting validation found the FC environment provided 2 to 10 times faster responses as workloads surpassed 80% SAN utilization and 20-30% less CPU utilization than FCoE."
for the complete Report, please refer to the Website here (registration required).

At the same time, the adoption of 10 GbE is obviously picking up speed (as reported here), so -as so many times before in our industry- the lower cost datacenter connectivity (10 GbE) may be just "good enough" in the long run!

January 2014

Welcome to 2014 (or MMXIV)!

I'll spare you another round of forecasts about what might and might not happen in the storage industry in 2014, there have been plenty of those lists published in the past couple weeks!
Instead, let me summarize a couple noteworthy news for you - which of course is also a way to hint at what -I personally believe- will be important trends in 2014!
One battle certainly to continue is the battle over the control over storage or rather the "location of the intelligence" in storage: remember 10 years ago: common wisdom was that most of the intelligence would be located in the SAN and the back-end storage would be mere commodity (EMC Invista!). Well, it turned out that customers preferred to invest in sophisticated storage controllers while the network became a commodity...
Fast forward to 2013: There is a lot of hype around SDS (Software Defined Storage), which would relegate the "intelligence" to some "open source" storage controller running on a commodity server.
Hypervisor vendors like VMware and Microsoft on the other hand are integrating more of the storage controls into their hypervisors and hope to make storage intelligence obsolete. And obviously related to that is the discussion and battle about block or file access to storage.
The article here outlines reasons why VMware needs to step up efforts on NFS!
But watch out, on the block side of the protocol segment, the FCIA is finalizing 32Gbps Fibre Channel - or Gen6 Fibre Channel as they are going to call it.

According to "The Register", 2013 was the year "..when Google made Tape cool again"!
Now there is more exciting news to be expected in 2014: Read this summary from the Fujitsu "IT Global Summit" and the "Nanocubic coating" being introduced for magnetic tape!
So watch this space for announcements from IBM during 2014!

Talking about IBM, there's two recent news that clearly show the direction my company is taking: First, the beta availability of ICStore, a unique implementation of "cloud gateway" technology for our Storwize platform providing data protection " ..that will allow organizations to use multiple cloud storage services interchangeably, reducing dependence on any single cloud vendor and ensuring that data remains available even during service outages."

And second, the rollout of WaaS ("Watson as a Service") in late 2013:

“The next generation will look back and see 2013 as a year of monumental change,” said Stephen Gold, vice president of the Watson project at IBM.

“This is the start of a shift in the way people interact with computers.”

IBM is wielding Watson in a fight to control the world of cloud computing — huge collections of computer servers connected over the Internet — with other big technology companies like Amazon.com, Google and Microsoft. It is no coincidence that IBM discussed its Watson news the same week Amazon was hosting clients at a conference here to pitch its own computing cloud, called Amazon Web Services or A.W.S."

This is definitely a key element of IBM's plans to resume revenue growth in 2014!

And by the way: Probably the last acquisition IBM made in 2013 is immediately related to cloud services: Aspera, a company with ".. an Emmy-award-winning, high-speed bulk data transfer protocol."

So all the best to you for 2014 and let's hope that the European economy continues on the positive trend that we seem to have started in Q3 2013!

December

Hot off the press:
IDC's Q3  "Worldwide External Disk Storage Systems Factory Revenue" numbers.
"Despite the revenue contraction in the third quarter, we see strong demand for offerings targeted at heavily virtualized environments, such as integrated infrastructure," said Eric Sheppard, research director, IDC storage. "However, this demand has been offset by several factors: reduced spending from the U.S. government, increased use of storage efficiency technologies, increased investment in public cloud capacity, and general price pressures associated with increased competitive environments."
See the detailed report here!

November II

It has been quite a while since the last announcement of bigger HDDs: We have had 4 TB disk drives available for about 24 months now! In the past couple weeks however, there seems to be renewed activity in the segment of high-capacity HDDs with HGST (Hitachi Global Storage; subsidiary of Western Digital) starting sale of the much-anticipated 6 TB Helium-drive (add two more platters; same areal density!).

Western Digital (WD) adding to the buzz with their plans (no product yet!) to provide increased areal density using HAMR (heat assisted magnetic recording), a technology which is in development over at Seagate as well!

The third promising candidate in the race to squeeze more bits into a 3.5 inch real-estate is "shingled magnetic recording" dubbed as SMR, details are outlined here.
While this technology basically uses hardware that is available today, it kind of changes some of the very characteristics of HDDs: In-place updates become impractical to impossible with the shingled, intertwined tracks (by the way: we have used this approach in tape drives for many years!). Means that HDDs using that technology will be used preferably for data which is not updated, so archive-type of usages! That's the reason why vendors are actually looking into using LTFS (linear tape file system) to access and manage SMR type of disk drives! See details from SNIA and WD here!

I have not figured out yet which technologies can be combined and which ones don't go together - but to me it certainly looks like as if the next wave of capacity increases for HDD is upon us! The question remains if the costs will be at an acceptable level: with the consumer market (tablets, smartphones) using mostly flash storage, the volumes for these new technology HDDs will probably remain lower than what we have been used to in the age of desktops and laptops?

And finally, wrapping up my update in spinning rust, here's an interesting report from Backblaze (a backup service provider) on how long these small mechanical wonders are supposed to last:
"For disk drives, it may be that all of them will wear out before they are 10 years old. Or it may be that some of them last 20 or 30 years. If some of them live a long, long time, it makes it hard to compute the average. Also, a few outliers can throw off the average and make it less useful.
The number that we will be able to compute soon, and the one that is more likely to be useful, is the median lifespan of a new drive. In other words, at what age have half of the drives failed? We are starting to get an idea what the answer will be."
For additional thoughts and details, please also refer to this report from Google on their observations around drive failure expectations.