Storage Effect

Servers supporting Web 2.0 are very real - and very costly

Business Week reports that Facebook’s new pile of cash will be used to buy servers.  They currently have 10,000;  they’ll get 50,000 more.  Yet they’re way behind Google and MSN in the computing arms race.

Om Malik draws some conclusions on this as well.

In Web 2.0 terms, servers mean storing as much as processing.  Traditionally servers were all about crunching the numbers.  Even today, high-end servers doing the transactional heavy lifting in businesses of all types rely on the fastest disk drives - even enterprise SSDs - but require little capacity.

Changing IT as we know it

Facebook’s investment is a stark example of how hardware in general and storage in particular are a very necessary part of our growing cyber communities.  

These are early days.  Expect continued acceleration in these kinds of investments, and watch for the consequences of such a large techno-economic shift. 

Increased competition in wifi and broadband is accelerating the need for storage

I’m writing this in a Caribou Coffee shop, a surprisingly large chain in Minneapolis that’s matched Starbucks store-for-store here.  Until recently, I would have had to get a passcode from the barista for free wifi - for an hour.  Now, it’s straight to the web, no hotel-esque stop at Caribou’s corporate web page. All free, all the time.

While I greatly appreciate the gesture, it’s no coincidence that Minneapolis just turned on its city-wide wifi service.  Not to mention the local cable company’s launch of the nation’s highest speed cable broadband package at 50Mbps.  Competition is a wonderful thing!

What does this have to do with storage?

If you’ve read my blog much, you already know the connection.  The easier it is for consumers to access content, the more they will keep.  And the more they will be offered. And so on.

There’s no slowdown in sight.  Frankly, I think we’re still in first gear.  Solutions that scale and simplify management of vast vats of content - for you and me, as well as for a Google or Amazon - will win big in the next few years. 

Content storage is now a core need for business

For solution providers, in between the consumer and the corporation there is a desperate need to do “business content” right.  For companies of all sizes it’s no longer about IT, it’s about satisfying customers.  What a chance to be a hero!

Are you seeing this in your company or home?  How’s your access? 

Enterprise Strategy Group’s Mark Peters and I sat down in Minneapolis today and talked shop.  Besides having a cool Oxford-trained English accent, his views on the storage landscape rang true to me:

• The storage system market is out of balance right now, with several “big boys” (IBM, EMC et al) and dozens of “little guys” playing in the same sandbox. 
• This is not sustainable, and causing the industry mainstays to make unusually bold moves (witness EMC’s SSD and Mozy forays and IBM’s Diligent and XIV acquisitions)
• Xiotech and Atrato are exciting because they are promising clear, core benefits.   “Do you want maintenance-free storage, or storage that requires service visits/costs/risks?”
• Xiotech and Compellent are both based in Minnesota with common management roots, but seem to have staked out two distinct storage solution spaces.  More on this in another post.
• “Green” is overhyped.  Mostly storage companies mean “energy efficient”, and would do well to be clearer on this. 

Keep your eyes peeled for a new blog from Mark.  Not too surprising given ESG’s success with Steve’s IT Rants blog.  I hope Mark dives in.  His unique perspective would benefit many.

99% of data recovered from a drive in the tragic crash 

It’s amazing and somehow very sad that engineers were able to recover the data from a Seagate disk drive found in the wreckage of the shuttle Columbia. 

When things get tough at work, a colleague of mine is fond of saying “they’re just disk drives.”  This kind of brings that home.

More on the story from Engadget.

Update: more on this story from Blocks and Files.  Dave Reinsel at IDC has written a detailed report as well, accessible to subscribers for a fee.  Intriguing perspectives about the persistence of data in disk drives for good and ill. 

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They also see storage demand resisting the recession 

Storage Soup reports that Compellent believes their great results are partly due to the disturbance in the partner status quo caused by Dell’s acquisition of Equallogic. 

Equallogic has great products, and they gain lots of leverage as part of Dell.  But in this innovation-rich market, there’s a downside to change in the channel.  Hungry companies with good products get a shot at previously loyal customers. 

Any Compellent customers out there that care to comment?  How about Equallogic loyalists?

Containerized computing will do for data centers what shipping containers did for shipping

Patrick Thibodeau and Eric Lai at Computerworld explored the new world of modular, containerized data centers.   They see containerized computing transforming data centers at the level that containers reinvented the shipping industry last century.

Everyone’s seemingly getting in the game -  IBM, Sun, Rackable, Verari Systems for starters.

Reinventing scale

This technology will help deal with the challenges of scale in Web 2.0-driven datacenters.  I posted previously on a smaller version of this technology, but with a twist: hosting in Iceland.

SSDs in notebooks show little to no benefit vs. disk drives

Bill O’Brien at Computerworld asked the same question I did in February.  He conducted some pretty comprehensive head-to-head testing between a pair of SSDs and Seagate’s Momentus and Barracuda disk drives. 

The results surprised him:

So forgive me for being contrarian, but while I recognize the exotic and alluring nature of solid state disks as a technology — and have certainly fallen victim to their potential “wow factor” on occasion — after spending 12 days with a pair of them and a pair of mechanical drives, I’m, convinced that SSDs have yet to live up to their true potential.

I disagree that his conclusions are contrarian - although they would have been not long ago.  SSD for notebooks has peaked on the hype curve and is accelerating its slide into disillusionment. 

Someday flash storage will rock in notebook PCs.  But not today, not for a $1000+ premium, not as a standalone replacement for a disk drive. 

Hybrid drives that combine the two technologies…that’s a story for another day.

Who’s using SSDs in their notebook today?  Are you satisfied?

Storage performance specs are so last millenium  

Going by today’s headlines, storage vendors should add a new spec to their data sheets: hackability.

Case in point: yet another theft of reams of customer data, this time in the UK.  Tapes left in a car.

Wired Magazine’s Fetish spread features the Maxtor BlackArmor drive from Seagate.   This is a new kind of extreme storage device.  It’s virtually unhackackable, offering AES encryption encased within the hard drive itself.  So if it gets stolen or lost (does it matter which?), you can sleep secure in the fact that someone else may have your drive, but they don’t have your data.

It’s got a high “eye candy” factor, too - so you can be safe AND cool.

Update: CDW is taking orders for BlackArmor now.

There’s more than one way to seed the storage clouds for profit

Storagezilla doesn’t think Amazon’s got a winner with their cloud storage business. 

Label me a Cloud Believer.  The long-term money-making details may still be unclear for Amazon, but others are raking in the profits on cloud storage.  Take Google, for instance.

Google’s not a thriving cloud storage company?  Au contrair! 

Google has nailed the Cloud concept with a Library model.  I “check out” my data when I need directions to a hip restaurant or insight on the curative properties of a green-lipped mussel.  Meanwhile, Google’s bookshelves keep expanding. Very profitably, I might add.

Maybe that’s what happens when you start out by selling books…everything looks like a book store.

I’m sure Jeff Brazos and team will get there with time.  And they won’t be the only ones!

Who out there is paying someone to keep their information?  What do you like about your service?  What needs to be fixed?

I counted:

• Home PC (500GB)
• Office laptop (100GB) - upgraded from 40GB
• Home backup (500GB)
• Office local backup (500GB)
• Tivo (80GB) - it’s getting long in the tooth
• 2 mobile drives (~80GB each) - I rotate copies of my home data and keep them at work. Presto! Remote storage.
• Pocket drive (6 GB)
• Video camera (40GB)
• Update: forgot about my 2006-era iPod (8GB)
• and my kids’ 8-yr old PC (40GB?)

My company bought some of these on my behalf.

That’s 9 11 drives for me.  How many do you own?