Bucking economic trends as recently as September
Storage Station noted that Gartner and IDC are seeing about 10% growth in storage revenue in the third quarter of 2008. That’s pretty recent evidence that storage continues to resist macroeconomic momentum.
While it’s clearly not a boom time given the layoffs announced by EMC, Pillar, WD, Hutchinson and others, it’s a relatively positive trend.
These days we take what we can get.
Categories: Industry trends
Tagged: economy, EMC, Gartner, Hutchinson, IDC, Pete Steege, Pillar, storage, storage effect, Storage Station, WD
Actually a good thing for IBM and their customers
IBM launched a major new storage initiative. Byte and Switch summarized it succinctly.
The message sounds a bit EMCish, specifically their Digital Universe from last year. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, if IBM can execute in a unique way. The issue is clearly universal. If your competitor’s tapped into a core need, sometimes it pays to swallow your pride and join the ride.
The “Information Footprint” concept is a nice nod to Green without hitting us over the head with it.
I’m looking forward to see what IBM does with this over the next year or two.
Categories: Datacenter · Storage Systems
Tagged: Digital Universe, EMC, green, IBM, Information Infrastructure
Data Domain, Avamar and ExaGrid all report strong sales growth
Byte and Switch profiled three separate data deduplication vendors: Data Domain, Avamar and ExaGrid. Each is having a great quarter, with sales up significantly.
Dedupe is still young, but it’s accelerating fast into mainstream enterprise traffic.
Categories: Backup · Datacenter · Storage Systems
Tagged: Avamar, Byte and Switch, data deduplication, Data Domain, deduplication, EMC, ExaGrid
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:
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.
Categories: Industry trends · Storage Systems
Tagged: EMC, IBM, Enterprise Strategy Group, XIV, Moshe Yanai, green, ESG, Diligent, Xiotech, Compellent, Mark Peters
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?
Categories: Backup · Data Security · Datacenter · Storage Systems
Tagged: Axiom 500, Barraucuda ES, Blocks and Files, Cheetah, Demartek, EMC, NetApp, Pillar Data, RAID, RAID 5, RAID 6, Savvio, Seagate
You generate much more information than the files and messages you create
EMC now has a digital footprint calculator on their website. It estimates how much information is being created, stored and replicated by one’s daily life. This is an eye-opening exercise that points out all the myriad ways we each generate digital information, far beyond the obvious powerpoints, emails and digital movies.
Similarities to Carbon Footprint
It has similarities with the Carbon Footprint concept, and of course is directly related due to the power needed to store the kept info I caused to exist in the world. Another similarity: much of the information created on my behalf was not at my bidding.
I highly recommend the related IDC-EMC forecast of worldwide information growth through 2011.
According to EMC, I’m generating about 8 GB a day – over half a TB so far in 2008. Beth Pariseau’s and Chuck Hollis’s footprints are here.
What’s your digital footprint? Comment back and we’ll compare notes.
Categories: Industry trends
Tagged: data growth, digital footprint, digital information, EMC, IDC
Deduplication prevents businesses from repeating themselves
Clever marketing from Overland Storage: contrasting their de-duplication solution with a copy machine. For me it brings home the essence of what de-dupe is all about.
As I posted yesterday, a major headache and expense for business data protection today is redundancy, meaning copying the same files over and over and over again. Deduplication is one of those technologies whose value is pretty easy to explain: it makes only one copy of everything, reducing the capacity required by 10 to 20X.
Management is limited, data is not
Rather than reduce capacity requirements, that frees up more data to be created, used, saved, distributed. Storage demand is not limited by the amount of data created, but by the ability of consumers and businesses to effectively manage it.
Case in point: according to EMC and IDC, 2007 was the first year that the data generated and replicated in the world exceeded the storage available to keep it.
Less data leads to more storage
I’ll say that again: Deduplication leads to more storage. Agree or disagree? Tell me why.
Categories: Backup · Datacenter · Industry trends
Tagged: copy machine, data protection, deduplication, EMC, IDC, Overland Storage
Two petabyte storage consolidation and virtualization up and running
Byte and Switch covered Ford’s revamp of their corporate data storage strategy, including 2 petabytes of virtualized storage. They used IBM’s SAN Volume Controller and DS4000 & DS8000 systems.
Ford’s Vijay Santoran says that they’ve tested EMC gear as well, and are not relying on a single solution.
Consolidation is paying off already, but it’s not a silver bullet
From the sounds of it, Ford has been able to deliver on the promises of virtualized storage, including fewer chasses, less power, delayed storage growth. Despite this, I believe Ford will ultimately be able to support more, not less data with this enabling architecture.
I’m a firm believer that storage as a business enabler trumps storage as a cost savings tool every time.
What do you think? I’d love to hear from you.
Categories: Datacenter · Storage Systems
Tagged: consolidation, DS4000, DS8000, EMC, Ford, IBM, SAN Volume Cobtroller, storage, Vijay Sankaran, virtualization
Will Cloud Computing take EMC from storage maker to storage user?
EMC is mostly known as a company that makes storage. That may change in the future, according to Data Center Knowledge. EMC’s Cloud Computing offering could someday rank them with Google, MSN and others as one of the top users of storage.
EMC’s recent acquisition of Pi, a personal information management startup is a step in that direction, according to Chuck Hollis, EMC’s VP of product alliances:
“Like a diamond being set into a ring by an expert jeweler, Pi is potentially the centerpiece of a very intriguing strategic play. And one that not too many people will initially appreciate, I believe. I think people are having a tough time putting EMC into a neat industry bucket.”
EMC clearly has a unique vertical business model opportunity as a storage provider and consumer.
Categories: Datacenter · Industry trends · Storage Systems
Tagged: Chuck Hollis, Cloud computing, Data Center Knowledge, EMC, Googe, MSN, storage
But no one’s yet sure exactly what
Byte and Switch talks about the storage impact of social networking on pure play Web 2.0 social networking sites as well as businesses in general.
The infrastructure seems to be emulating the network it supports, demanding what they call “cloud computing”. The needs are less about performance or even capacity, but managing the content cloud as it grows and changes.
EMC and IBM are on it. So are a slew of newer storage technology companies.
One thing’s for sure about storage for social networking: there’s going to be a lot of it.
Categories: Datacenter · Industry trends
Tagged: Byte and Switch, Cloud computing, EMC, IBM, social networking, storage
