Entries categorized as ‘Datacenter’
December 30, 2008 · 1 Comment
Storage will make the biggest impact of any technology in the 2010’s
Think I’m crazy? Think again.
Information and energy drive today’s world. The internet has re-invented life and work for the digitally enabled parts of the world, and the electrical grid and gas-powered transportation systems are what make our physical economy go round.
Batteries and bytes will change the world
Storage is the prime enabler of both of these infrastructures. And storage innovations for both will revolutionize both of these infrastructures over the next few years.
Energy storage is better known as fuel. Conventional energy media - coal and gas – are finally giving way (partly) to more efficient media. Notably, battery technology is at an inflection point, poised to transform automobiles and (yet again) information technology.
The U.S. government is even considering a Sematech-like consortium to collectively catch up on battery manufacturing capability.
Information storage is also going through a media transition. Solid state flash is finally ready to stand with disk drives and tape. In the next decade, the new storage media ecosystem will transform personal and business computing in ways we can’t even know today.
Information doesn’t get the headlines that software or processors or networking does, but none of these technologies would be usable without today’s storage technology. More than ever before, information is the mother of all technology, and storage is where that information resides.
Categories: Datacenter · Industry trends
Tagged: alternative energy, Batteries, disk drives, Flash, infrastructure, internet, SSD, storage
December 15, 2008 · 1 Comment
Servers would give them the third leg of the data center “stool”
Chris Mellor interpreted Cisco’s recent body language around servers. Will they jump into the server business?
It’s not that much of a stretch. It’s only fair, as HP and others don’t shy away from dabbling in Cisco’s networking space.
And Cisco has already crossed into the storage realm.
Used to be that IT was all about processing. Today servers, storage and networking are the three legs of the data center stool. They’re the Mind, Stomach and Voice of the digital body of business.
The smartest of the big players in all three spaces will look for ways to corner them all.
Categories: Datacenter · Industry trends · Servers · Storage Systems
Tagged: Chris Mellor, Cisco, Dell, HP, networking, Servers, storage, The Register
Cisco’s medianet will transport the content, but who will store it?
Cisco’s medianet initiative is a network response to the video-rich world that is evolving at break-neck speed.
I’ve posted on this trend frequently because the effect on storage surpasses the network transformation Cisco sees coming.
Cisco will be temporarily touching the bytes of content as they move around, but where will they come to rest? The storage industry will need to step up to the plate to ensure this wave of new content has a place to land.
Categories: Datacenter · Industry trends · Storage Systems
Tagged: Cisco, medianet, networking, storage, video
Data growth and data value trump need to cut costs
Sepaton surveyed enterprise customers and found that data protection stays in the “have to” pile when it comes time to choose which bills to pay in these tough times. A summary of Jon Toigo’s summary of Sepaton’s report:
- Nearly 75% will maintain or increase data protection budgets in 2009
- Investments are focused on reducing the cost of data protection
- Large and growing volumes of data are becoming the business status quo
- Virtualization is increasing data protection demands
- A majority are using tape today; a minority expect to be using tape in 12 months
When times are tough, true priorities emerge. The care and feeding of business data makes the list, it seems.
Categories: Backup · Data Security · Datacenter
Tagged: data protection, Drunken Data, Jon Toigo, Sepaton, tape, virtualization
November 11, 2008 · 1 Comment
SSDs will be an almost ideal addition to enterprise storage systems. Notebooks? Not so much.
1. Many drives vs. one drive. SSDs replace multiple disk drives in high-end enterprise systems. Notebooks use SSDs as a one-for-one replacement, which wastes most of the game-changing advantages of flash.
2. Servers need speed, notebooks need capacity. Servers can use SSD’s blazing performance without requiring much capacity. SSD performance matters little to a notebook, but hundreds of gigabytes are needed per drive. SSDs biggest weakness is cost per gigabyte.
3. SSD power consumption matters more to the enterprise. Notebooks care about power, but the drive’s share of a notebook’s power draw doesn’t make that much difference in battery life. High-end enterprise systems have a heat problem from multiple drives in a small space that SSD will help to alleviate.
4. Notebooks don’t leverage SSD speed. A notebook’s boot time and performance depend on many factors beyond access time. High-end systems use many drives striped in parallel to maximize performance – a perfect opportunity for a much faster device.
Even in Enterprise, the devil is in the details
So let’s go, right? Not so fast, cowboy! One way SSD is less suited for the data center than notebooks is in durability. Unlike notebooks, high-end systems work storage devices like dogs. SSDs are improving, but today’s products can wear out before their time. Losing data in a notebook doesn’t compare with losing it in a high-end business application. And standards are a bigger deal in the data center.
Ready-for-prime-time versions will be available starting in 2009. In the meantime, it’s smart to start playing with the technology now so you’re ready to implement in volume next year.
Buy a fancy SSD notebook, too, if you’re a Techie or want to act like one. If not, it’s probably a waste of your money.
Categories: Datacenter · Laptop PC · SSD
Tagged: battery life, disk drive, enterprise, Flash, laptop, notebook, performance, power, SSD, storage
Seagate’s CEO Bill Watkins and Marketing SVP Pat King on the Wild West of storage
Chris Meilor listened in as Seagate CEO Bill Watkins and Marketing SVP Pat King talked about Seagate’s plans for home NAS, SSD, hybrid storage and more at a recent press event. It’s a good read – check it out here.
Chris refers to the consumer storage market as the Wild West, but that moniker could easily be used to describe the storage market in general. Dramatic change is underway across the spectrum, from the largest corporations overwhelmed with petabyte growth and data on the loose to the Dawning of the Digital Consumer.
The storage industry is exciting (and always has been) for those who work in it. It’s becoming more relevant and entertaining to those outside of the industry as content and its storage matter like never before.
Categories: Datacenter · Digital Home · Industry trends · Laptop PC · Storage Systems
Tagged: Bill Watkins, CEO, Chris Melior, home NAS, home storage, Hybrid, Pat King, Seagate, SSD, storage, The Register
November 4, 2008 · 1 Comment
Savvio is the world’s fastest drive - and uses up to 75% less power than 3.5″ drives
Seagate has rolled out a new generation of Savvio 2.5″ enterprise drives. They have better capacity, performance and power efficiency, of course. But the really big news? These drives signal the performance/capacity/power crossover point between 3.5″ and 2.5″ drives.
So for a 24-drive 2.5″ 10K rpm storage system vs. a 12-drive 3.5″ 15K rpm storage system:
- Capacity is now the same (up to 300GB for 2.5″, up to 600GB for 3.5″)
- Performance is 60% higher
- Power consumption is 20% lower
Until now, 2.5″ drives had won over the server market but not the storage system market. Lower power 2.5″ drives didn’t make up for the cumulative power impact of packing twice as many drives into a single system. And 2.5″ capacities peaked at 147GB.
No longer! Expect to see accelerated adoption of 2.5″ into high performance storage systems.
Categories: Datacenter · Products · Storage Systems
Tagged: 10K rpm, 15K, 2.5", 3.5", performance, power consumption, Savvio
Local appliance addresses the biggest objection to cloud storage: loss of control
i365 has added an on-premises backup and recovery appliance to its EVault online backup and recovery services.
One of the biggest inhibitors to Cloud Storage for backups has been that businesses don’t want to lose control of their data. Drunken Data mounted the soapbox on this topic Monday. No matter what assurances a Cloud service makes, it’s hard not to feel safer with data on-site.
The poster child for this reluctance is Amazon S3, which guarantees 99.95% uptime, yet has a history that falls short of this level.
The EVault Express Recovery Appliance stages backups locally, allowing transfers to the Cloud over time. The incremental costs for the appliance are small compared to conventional 100% on-site backup. Near-term recovery time is quicker, but maybe more important is the emotional benefit of having recent backups within the company walls (locally or at a remote facility).
This pragmatic tweak to the Cloud Storage model could open up the business market for SaaS in a big way. What do you think?
Categories: Backup · Business Solutions · Cloud computing · Datacenter
Tagged: appliance, Backup, cloud storage, EVault, i365, online, recovery, SaaS
