Storage Effect

Thanks to Ruptured Monkey for this campy but cool IBM video from the Fifities on how their RAMAC (and the disk drive) was created.

(photo courtesy of IBM.com)

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. 

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.

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?

Servers are already there; 300GB could be the tipping point for storage systems

Seagate announced a 300GB version of its Savvio 10K rpm drive, the highest 2.5″ SAS capacity yet available.  Is this the dawning of the Age of Small Form Factor for enterprise storage?  Information Week thinks so.

The server market has already made the turn.  HP and other high-volume server makers have committed to 2.5″ SAS drives for performance servers.  Power, size and reliability benefits make it a no-brainer.  And while 2.5″ hasn’t yet taken over servers from system builders, the switchover has begun.

For storage systems, the capacity just hasn’t been there. At 300GB, it may be.  A 2.5″ drive is 70% smaller than 3.5″ SAS drives, which max out at 450GB today (although 600 GB will be along before long). 

What say you?  How are you using 2.5″ 10K or 15K drives in storage applications today?

Quadrupling of viewers will sustain storage growth for consumers and in the Cloud

ABI Research’s new study shows that it’s early days for online video consumption.  Hard to believe when you look at already gargantuan YouTube. 

ABI mentions several winners from this trend, like content providers and consumer electronics makers.  They forgot to mention local solution providers, but they should have. Here’s why: 

• Video drives storage more than any other content (proven by IDC’s Digital Universe Study)
• Home storage will mushroom beyond what a single PC or Tivo box can handle
• Consumers will need help to make it all work together

It’s not clear how the Digitally Organized Home will ultimately look. That means there will be years during which consumers need people on the ground locally to help them install, expand and combine their stuff.  A perfect new role for small business-focused solution providers!

How are you setting up video storage in the home?  Will IPTVs, external storage, DVRs or home servers be the center of the digital home?

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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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.