I’m heading to the lake, as Minnesotans tend to do this time of year. I’m not ready to turn that into a Plugged In experience, so no posts for a week.
We’ll see how I do. If I get desperate, I know there’s a coffee shop with WiFi about 20 minutes away.
Or I could go see the world’s largest floating Loon.
Talk to you in a week.
Categories: Random
In the Petabyte Age, new applications are redefining “Big Storage”
Think you’re with it now that you say “terabytes” instead of “gigabytes”? You’re behind the curve. For some applications, a petabyte is not nearly enough.
Wired Magazine says we’re living in the Petabyte Age. One example: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, taking a billion “photos” of protons a second with each of six detectors.
The LHC, expected to run 24/7 for most of the year, will generate about 10 petabytes of data per second. That staggering flood of information would instantly overwhelm any conceivable storage technology, so hardware and software filters will reduce the take to roughly 100 events per second that seem most promising for analysis. Even so, the collider will record about 15 petabytes of data each year, the equivalent of 15,000 terabyte-size hard drives filled to the brim.
Just one of many extreme data examples in this great read. Soon, petabytes for all! Remember, scientists used to get giddy over 5 megabytes. Dell’s David Graves at Inside IT says ”More storage please!”
Better learn to spell exabyte.
Categories: Industry trends · Random · Storage Systems
Tagged: Dell, Inside IT, Large Hadron Collider, LHD, petabyte, storage, Wired Magagazine
Content comes first, opening up new uses and usefulness
Seagate announced Maxtor CentralAxis today, a really cool New Thing in home storage. Until now, external storage devices have mostly been storage add-ons for a PC. Even the NAS devices out there have focused on providing a “PC drive for the home”. It’s shareable storage, but shackled to the PC model.
CentralAxis puts the content first, rather than the PC. That opens up uses that until now have been reserved for the techies among us:
CentralAxis does all the “home storage” basics as well: 1 TB capacity, centralized backups from PCs on the network, etc. But it’s the new approach to content that makes it a game changer.
Categories: Digital Home · Products · Storage Systems
Tagged: Backup, CentralAxis, external storage, home storage, Maxtor, NAS, Seagate
Vista needs your help to make it truly valuable to your customers
Bill Gates made a case last month in Tokyo that Vista is “selling rapidly”, 140 million units and counting. He compared Vista adoption favorably with XP at this point in its launch in 2003.
Is Vista a success?
Kevin McLaughlin at ChannelWeb says the truth for solution providers is “somewhere between the hope and hysteria.”
A friend of mine who is head of marketing for a national solution provider told me that he’s still waiting for Microsoft to spell out for his customers good reasons to switch from XP. Vista’s a fine product, but his customers aren’t taking the time and risk to change over.
Security’s not it, because they’ve built security around their XP solutions that work just fine.
Maybe storage can help my friend and others. Vista with the right storage can do things XP can’t. Automated backup, entertainment ‘command central’, etc. With today big and cheap drives, solution providers can throw a terabyte into their desktops. Even notebooks can be high capacity now.
It’s in your hands. Translate Vista into new value for your customers, and it will deliver value for you.
Categories: Desktop · Laptop PC
Tagged: Bill Gates, ChannelWeb, Kevin McLaughlin, Vista, Windows, XP
SAS drives get bigger and smaller to take share from SATA for business applications
IDC data from InfoStor shows this year and next are the golden age of SATA drives in the enterprise.
It’s not that the trend for high capacity storage abates in the future; it’s that SAS drives are expanding their capabilities to replace SATA in many applications.
Why settle for an interface originally designed for PCs if you can get the same thing in SAS for a little bit more?
SATA drives won’t go away of course – they still provide the most capacity for the dollar. If it’s good enough for an application, people will continue to use it.
Have you made the jump to SAS? Why or why not?
Categories: Datacenter · Industry trends · Random · Servers · Storage Systems
Tagged: 1 TB, 2.5", Barracuda ES, IDC, InfoStor, SAS, SATA, Savvio
Copying a page from their PC strategy for x86 servers and storage
Newsweek’s Roger Kay makes a convincing case for Dell as a serious contender in the server space. And they’re doing it Dell Style – coming up from below, more direct in many ways than HP.
They’ve got a lot of momentum:
Why is this important to a historically PC-centric company? Roger sees it:
Desktops tend to yield gross margins in the 8% to 12% range, and notebooks hit 12% to 18%; servers come in at a much fatter 18% to 26%.
Add to the server success their Equallogic acquisition and an aggressive move into 2.5″ SAS storage, and Dell is looking well positioned in the fast-growing SMB IT space.
Categories: Business Solutions · Company Profiles · Datacenter · Servers
Tagged: Data Center Services, Dell, Newsweek, Roger Kay, server, SMB, storage
Cool, but encryption is a kindler and gentler way to retire disk drives
Blocks and Files highlighted this very physical solution to a data management problem: how to be sure sensitive data on retired disk drives never again sees the light of day. It’s a do-it-yourself version of industrial disk crushers.
Verity’s quite excited about the Hard Drive Destroyer, and I know it fills a desperate need. But it’s not very resource-efficient nor environmentally friendly. That’s a perfectly good drive! Can’t someone else use it?
The renewable alternative: self-encrypting hard drives like the Momentus FDE and BlackArmor. When it’s time to retire, throw away the AES-grade encryption key, and Poof! - what was once written will never be seen again. Certifiably so.
Momentus FDE is a notebook drive. The first enterprise FDE drive will be the Seagate Cheetah 15K . Stay tuned.
Who’s destroying drives out there? Anyone willing to admit they’re ignoring this problem and reusing drives?
Categories: Data Security · Digital Home · Laptop PC
Tagged: 15K, BlackArmor, Cheetah, FDE, Hard Drive Destroyer, Momentus, Verity
Becomes the first major supplier to offer a 2.5″ SAS storage system
Dell uncharacteristically took the role of technology leader and launched the MD1120, a direct-attach storage system with 2.5″ SAS drives for their PowerEdge servers (thanks Blocks and Files). It’s likely that their major competitors (and others) will follow with their own announcements in the near future.
Why 2.5″ SAS?
Make no mistake – they may be small, but they are the cream of the crop. Fastest (for 10K rpm), most reliable, highest data integrity. Oh – and they use less space and a lot less power than 3.5″ drives.
Don’t confuse 2.5″ SAS drives with notebook drives. They’re similar in size, but that’s about the only thing they have in common.
The beginning of the end for 3.5″ enterprise drives
The only fatal flaw for 2.5″ and storage has been capacity. These drives are already the standard for servers, but storage system makers couldn’t make the numbers work with only 147GB per drive.
It looks like 300GB may be the tipping point. Seagate recently launched the first 300GB 2.5″ SAS drive, the Savvio 10K.3.
What’s your 2.5″ storage plan? Is it time?
Categories: Products · Servers · Storage Systems
Tagged: 10K, 2.5", DAS, Dell, MD1120, PowerEdge, SAS, Savvio, Seagate
Content drives storage, but the reverse is partially true
There’s no doubt the developments I listed in Friday’s post are enabling storage growth. But they are mostly just removing the speed bumps impeding the real driver.
With apologies to Bill Clinton, “It’s the content, stupid.”
Without a purpose, all that impressive technology would sit on the shelf. Here are the real reasons storage demand will continue unabated:
It’s tempting to think that the storage industry is luring new customers with dazzling storage technology. The truth is they’re scrambling to keep up with customer demands for a good place to keep all their stuff.
Categories: Digital Home · Industry trends
Tagged: consumer, digital content, storage growth, video
Do you buy this reasoning? I don’t. These are real trends, and positive. But they are based on the premise of “build it and they will come”.
Tune in on Monday for the real reasons storage will continue to blow the doors off projections for the next 5 years.
Categories: Industry trends
Tagged: deduplication, power efficiency, storage, trends
