Storage Effect

Keeps your data “somewhere between New York and London” so it’s safe and cheap to manage

Leave the urban data center hosting problems of high energy cost, aging infrastructure and complex regulation behind.  Start fresh in the wilds of Canada…at an undisclosed location called “Dataville“. 

Bastionhost seems to be having success with this colorful business plan. It seems their customers don’t care where their data is, as long as it’s given the respect it deserves - and they can get to it.  All the better if the data center can get really cheap power and use groundwater-based cooling. 

Ya gotta love a truly unique idea!  Looks more like a cold war missile silo than a data center, but that’s OK.

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. 

• Bigger SAS: 1 TB SAS drives, matching the largest available SATA capacity.
• Smaller SAS:  2.5″ SAS drives, rapidly replacing 3.5″ SCSI, FC and SAS drives. 

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?

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:

• Strong success supplying Microsoft’s datacenters
• A filled-out server line up
• Services that help customers adapt Dell servers to their applications
• Data Center Services (DCS) - a cloud-building unit with Yahoo, Facebook and Baidu as customers

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.

Storage “arms dealing”, the recession and the content revolution

Robert’s conducted a great interview with Seagate CEO Bill Watkins.  He really got Bill to open up, share what was on his mind.  Well, I guess that’s not that unusual…but it’s a great interview nonetheless!

Check it out 

Survey shows virtualized servers are to storage what salted peanuts are to an ice cold drink

Dave Simpson at InfoStor reported on Enterprise Strategy Group’s recent survey on server virtualization.  They explored how this new technology is affecting storage plans and practices.  Results:

• Over half of respondents saw storage volume increase due to server virtualization
• Only 7% saw storage volume decreasing
• Network storage performance was a bigger server virtualization concern than storage cost
• Half of respondents use multiple storage technologies for their virtual server environment (#1: FC SAN)

Server virtualization is a leading indicator for storage

A clear lesson here is that server virtualization adopters are fertile ground for storage solutions.  

How aware are you of your customer’s virtual plans? 

How familiar are you with server virtualization-friendly storage solutions like Compellent?

Compellent’s success is about more than their technology

My first clue that Compellent is different came in the lobby bathroom.  In their LEED-certified corporate HQ (the first in Minnesota), the urinals use no water.

Compellent is getting rave reviews from their fast-growing customer base, not just for their storage solution, but also for their “thin provisioning” approach to delivering and supporting their solutions.  I had an eye-opening visit to Compellent and talked with Larry Aszmann, their CTO. 

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A lesson from light beer

Calling a disk drive “green” is like calling a light beer “healthy”.  In both cases, the means to achieve a goal are being confused with the goal itself.

Just as switching from regular to light beer might help someone (a little) improve their health, lower power disk drives can reduce the power consumption (and carbon footprint) of a datacenter, DVR or PC. 

Seagate gets this.  They don’t slap a big “Green” label on their drives.  Yet in general, Seagate’s products are the most power efficient at any specific performance/capacity point.  That means that using Seagate drives can result in the lowest overall power consumption for your system, whatever it may be.

Look beyond the label of your storage components when trying to configure the most power efficient solution. 

Agree or disagree?  Let’s discuss this further.

EDS differentiates HP more than you might think

Could Om Malik be on to something?  Unlike other analysts looking at HP’s pending acquisition of EDS as a me-too consultancy move - similar to IBM acquiring Price Waterhouse Cooper a few years back - he sees HP shooting for the clouds. 

His rationale: EDS’ clear strengths in outsourcing, plus other recent HP acquisitions all pointing to building out a global data center infrastructure. 

This would be a great play for them to put their comprehensive server and storage system portfolio to work in-house. 

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?

Even best-in-class rebuild times expose data to hours of risk

Blocks and Files points to an Demartek study (sponsored by Pillar) showing that the Pillar Axiom 500 rebuild times are much shorter on high capacity arrays that similar EMC or NetApp systems.

The glaring data beyond Pillar’s performance, though, is the teeth-clenchingly long times that data is one drive failure away from catastrophic loss in every case. 

The tests were conducted with about 50 500GB drives per system using RAID 5 (RAID 4 for NetApp), meaning the arrays can be rebuilt if one drive fails, but not two.  So during the rebuilds of from 3 to 23 hours, if another drive fails, all data is lost. 

Insert 1 TB drives into the equation, and your rebuild time (and vulnerability) doubles.

RAID 6 and other dual-failure protective schemes make this problem go away, but cost a little in capacity. 

How are you dealing with this?  I’ve heard that RAID 6 is gaining traction for 7200 rpm high capacity enterprise drives like Seagate’s Barracuda ES that are less reliable than 15K SAS enterprise drives (see Seagate’s 3.5″ Cheetah and 2.5″ Savvio for reference). 

Does your RAID vary by drive class?  What other magic do you apply to make this work?