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!”
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%.
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.
In the world of press announcements, Seagate can be a tortoise at times. And while flashy “first” press releases can garner attention for other disk drive vendors, it’s when the drives are in the hands of customers that really matters.
According to Engadget, Seagate has crossed the finish line first with 320GB 7200 rpm notebook drives from Dell. The Momentus 7200.3 is a rockin’ drive, too - check it out.
Here’s a slow-motion video of the Momentus 7200 zero-G sensor in action.
Who’s using 7200 rpm in their notebook? Is it worth the extra $46?
They also see storage demand resisting the recession
Storage Soup reports that Compellent believes their great results are partly due to the disturbance in the partner status quo caused by Dell’s acquisition of Equallogic.
Equallogic has great products, and they gain lots of leverage as part of Dell. But in this innovation-rich market, there’s a downside to change in the channel. Hungry companies with good products get a shot at previously loyal customers.
Any Compellent customers out there that care to comment? How about Equallogic loyalists?
Server virtualization is helping storage shrug off a weak economy
Byte and Switch observe that disk storage demand continues to expand, even as a recession threatens in the US economy. They see server virtualization and specifically the SCSI storage systems supporting it as the reason.
No surprise to me. Storage demand is limited primarily by the ability to manage it effectively. Virtualization makes server deployment easy, and iSCSI arrays make it easy to feeding their appetite for terabytes. Case in point: Dell’s Equallogic.
VMWare has helped open the door wide for real-world server virtualization, with Microsoft eager to walk in with Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.
A future big spark for business storage demand will be the “top-down” mainstream technology shift driven by XIV at IBM and Hulk/Maui at EMC.
The right product at the right time for Dell’s SMB customers
Dell has launched a storage solution for virtualized servers. The Equallogic iSCSI-based PS5000 includes up to 196 TB (16 TB per chassis) and the ease-of-use you expect from Equallogic. Choose SATA or SAS drives, depending on performance needs.
This product reflects the timeliness and fit of Dell’s aquisition of Equallogic. Virtualization is a hot topic for Dell’s SMB customer base, and easily managed storage to enable it is just what the doctor ordered.
Businesses still on XP, but consmers are overwhelmingly choosing Vista
Ed Bott at ZDNet dug deep into a Dell database to come up with surprising insight on Vista adoption. While business are installing XP twice as often as Vista, consumers are adopting Vista at a 93% rate.
As I’ve posted before, I believe Vista is well on its way to widespread adoption. And Vista is the poster child for storage consumption, leading to larger, more profitable disk drives for desktop and notebook.
A peek into APEX IT’s data room with Jean Charles Campagnon. How APEX selects their storage, Dell support, what’s in a name? In servers, today’s Ferrari is tomorrow’s Yugo!
APEX IT is a consulting a US nationwide firm focused on Oracle implementation.
Your customers can now buy secure notebooks with Full Disk Encryption from Dell. Similar notebooks have been available in the channel from ASI and others for six months. The mainstream value of this technology is summarized nicely by Business Week.
This is a good chance to offer new value in a commoditized space. Even reselling the Dell machine as part of a “Get Safe” solution for your customers will be profitable for you, because they’ll value some additional help in setting up key administration and management. That’s necessary so that they can’t lose passwords. With FDE drive technology, if you lose the password, the data on the drive is lost forever.
The value prop for your customer for secure notebooks: if a system is lost or stolen, the data from that PC will never be retrieved. No chance of them being on the Evening News due to exposing sensitive customer records.
An added bonus is simple and worry-free drive retirement or repurposing. Simply throw away the key and the previously stored data is gone forever. No more erasing seven times, writing over data, and crossing your fingers.
Should you build your own secure whitebook? Probably not yet, unless you’re up for the task of integrating the key management software with the drive, as Dell and ASI have done with Wave Systems. If you get it wrong, you’ll have angry customers with unaccessible data.
Seagate’s drive in this space, in both the Dell and ASI machines, is the Momentus 5400 FDE.
