Web services meet storage as a service
Are you ready for Internet storage? I mean, would you even consider tapping capacity that doesn't come from a pile of storage devices in your datacenter but instead originates somewhere in the cloud?
Are you ready for Internet storage? I mean, would you even consider tapping capacity that doesn't come from a pile of storage devices in your datacenter but instead originates somewhere in the cloud?
Continuing on the topic of open source storage, I would like to wish a belated happy birthday to the Aperi project, the first anniversary of which passed last month. I probably was not the only one to miss marking the occasion, as its first public update on the project went generally unnoticed.
To refresh your memory, AoE is an open source, reliable SAN transport protocol that uses MAC addresses to connect servers to their storage.
The data that we send over wires travels between two-thirds and three-quarters the speed of light, depending on the medium. Within the LAN, transfers from point A to point B appear to be immediate, with less than a millisecond delay.
Every time I hear a pitch for an SMB backup solution it comes complete with a chilling statistic that suggests smaller companies are tone-deaf to data protection.
According to a study recently published by IDC, a remarkable 92 percent of all server shipments worldwide in 2006 were volume servers (units that cost up to US$25,000 each). That's nearly 7 million shipments, to put a number on it. HP shipped the majority of those servers, about 34 percent, followed by IBM and Dell, each with 20 percent.
It hasn't happened to me so far (fingers crossed), but I imagine there are very few things more disturbing than having your personal information put at risk because someone lost or misplaced a tape cartridge or a laptop.
The storage industry isn't necessarily known for being a fast mover. Take for example <a href="http://www.idema.org/_smartsite/modules/local/data_file/show_file.php?cmd=download&data_file_id=1263">this memo, dated October 2003</a> (it's in Microsoft Word format), in which Seagate made clear the need to move the physical block size of disk drives to 4,096 bytes instead of 512 bytes.
Let's take a trip to the future this week. Imagine that we travel forward in time -- say, 100 years from now. How will the technological landscape of storage change in one century? What will our descendants think of the state of our technology?
FC, SCSI, SAS, SATA ... the alphabet soup of different connectivity protocols for disk drives can be confusing. Why do we have so many? The simple answer is because new technologies like SATA and SAS pop up fast, old technologies like SCSI do not disappear as quickly.
If you like cooking, you may have played the same game that I sometimes play while waiting in line at the grocery store: Checking out what other shoppers have in their baskets and trying to guess what meals they have in mind.
t may sound hasty to dismiss a technology that many companies have yet to deploy or even evaluate, but some of the vibes I am getting lately from vendors suggest that storage management applications may become obsolete before becoming mainstream.
No other storage topic is more sensitive for vendors and more important for potential customers than performance measurement. I've had vendors refuse to send me a product for review because of disagreements on which speed benchmarks to use during the evaluation.
This year in storage seems to be ending exactly as it started -- very busily. And it's a pattern that will continue in 2007, no doubt about that.
Sometimes you find some very surprising things in the results of a survey. Last week I was looking at a survey that Symantec conducted during a recent Black Hat convention.