Entries categorized as ‘Servers’
Virtualization removes the roadblocks to IT construction projects
(photo courtesy MnDOT)
One year ago the I-35W bridge collapsed here in Minneapolis. Amid the somber remembrances today is an amazing feat: there’s a replacement bridge already in place, set to open to traffic this fall.
How could a major freeway river crossing get rebuilt in less than a year?
Political will in this case helped. But the real driver was simplicity. There was no existing bridge to work around, no traffic to keep flowing. The ultimate fast-track project with nothing in the way.
IT works the same way
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Categories: Datacenter · Industry trends · Servers
Tagged: I-35W bridge collapse, management, Minneapolis, server virtualization, storage, virtualization
More content, more pixels, more copies, more channels
Gearlog reports that NBC will use a half a million gigabytes of disk storage to cover the Beijing Olympic games.
That’s right: 500 terabytes. A half petabye. For one event.
The new demands of digital video broadcasting
Why so much? Triple the hours of coverage of the 2004 Games, and many more channels (broadcast and web). I’m sure there’s a Digital HD multiplier in the equation as well.
NBC will use Omneon MediaDeck and MediaGrid servers and storage, and Seagate Barracuda ES hard drives to pull this off.
The strangest part: by the 2012 London Olympics, this solution will look quaint and seriously under-sized.
Categories: Business Solutions · Industry trends · Servers · Storage Systems
Tagged: Seagate, Barracuda ES, video production, NBC, Omneon, Olympics, Beijing, MediaGrid, MediaDeck
Because Disk looks more and more like Tape
Chris Evans points out the challenges of disk drive capacity outgrowing performance. Sound familiar? Until recently, these complaints were perennially aimed at linear-access tape technology, with random-access disk in the role of savior.
As disk now faces the same “can’t get the data out fast enough” problem, the solution is clear: SSDs. Flash is the new access king in storage. Or will be, because early products are struggling with reliability, write performance, and other capabilities that disk drive device and interface technology have fine-tuned over the decades. You can’t expect a breakthrough technology to hit the ground running.
Yesterday I found this Microsoft presentation in the blogosphere on the topic from 2006: flash_is_good
I guess I wasn’t original with my “Disk is the New Tape” thing. Makes the idea all the more interesting!
Next question: Is there room in the flash future for SSD, Disk and Tape?
Categories: Industry trends · Servers
Tagged: disk drive, Microsoft, Flash, SSD, tape
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, Savvio, SAS, Barracuda ES, SATA, InfoStor, IDC, 2.5"
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.
Categories: Business Solutions · Company Profiles · Datacenter · Servers
Tagged: storage, Dell, server, Newsweek, SMB, Data Center Services, Roger Kay
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: Seagate, Dell, Savvio, SAS, 2.5", 10K, MD1120, PowerEdge, DAS
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.
Categories: Industry trends · Servers · Storage Systems
Tagged: Facebook, Rackable Systems, server, storage, Web 2.0
Destroying data can be as important as creating it
How much time do you spend talking with your customers about what to do with their solutions when they are done with them? Maybe you should rethink your priorities.
According to Seagate, 50,000 enterprise drives are retired every year. In this age of highly proprietary business data and hyper-sensitive customer records, destroying information can be as important as creating it. How do businesses guarantee that data is completely removed from retired servers and storage - and PCs ?
Seagate, IBM and LSI have taken a step towards making this incredibly simple and inexpensive. With Seagate’s Cheetah 15K.6 FDE drive, available this summer, data can be made to disappear forever from retired server and storage drives with a single command.
This technology already exists for notebook PCs. In all cases, make sure proper password management procedures are in place before implementing these drives. Once the key is lost or erased, the data is gone forever.
More from Seagate on secure storage here.
Anyone out there using FDE in notebooks today? How is it working for you?
Categories: Data Security · Datacenter · Servers · Storage Systems
Tagged: Cheetah 15K, disk drives, FDE, IBM, LSI, retire, Seagate
There are 3 ways to integrate flash in your customers’ solutions today
Option 3: Build your own hybrid solutions
Today hybrid HDD-SSD flash drives are on the market for notebook applications. Future versions are in the works for other applications.
While the world waits, system builders can add the value themselves by combining flash and disk drives in their solutions. In particular, business applications can benefit from flash and disk tiers within a server or storage system. It’s not that difficult, now that SSDs that look just like disks to your OS are generally available. Mark Ferelli at InfoStor wrote on this a while ago.
Just a little flash goes a long way to juice your system’s performance, without adding exhorbitant costs. Not to mention adding some serious differentiation for the right customer.
Anybody out there doing this today? What’s your application?
Using flash storage today, part 2
Using flash storage today, part 1
Categories: Business Solutions · Industry trends · Servers · Uncategorized
Tagged: disk drive, HDD, Hybrid, InfoStor, Mark Ferelli, solid state disk, SSD, storage, system builder
(photo courtesy MnDOT)
