Storage Effect

New ideas for storage may be changing how we buy bytes

Curious about the mysterious ISE from Xiotech?  A picture paints a thousand words, and a video does it all the better.  Here’s a fun peek of the ISE at SNW from Robin Harris, coincidentally generating 48 simultaneous video streams.  Oooh!  Aaah!

It’s energizing to see conventional disk drive technology turned on its head to provide dramatic new value.  It goes to show that innovation is limited not by technology but by its application. 

Atrato is another innovative take on ‘black box’ storage - keep an eye on them as well.

Moving from exciting technology to real-world product is not trivial 

Robin Harris posted yesterday and last week on flash - both are interesting reading.  My takeaway is that the more flash is applied, the more real-world wrinkles bubble to the surface.  That’s exactly as it should be - new technology buzz always begins with what’s possible, then moves to “OK, now how exactly will that work in my solution today?” 

Borrowing from disk drives to make flash work

Also noticed how most of the issues and workarounds are things that have already been addressed with today’s disk drives.  Just goes to show that storage devices are more than the media.  Seagate’s in a great position as they enter the flash solutions world because of their depth in experience in making storage devices out of storage media.

What do you think? 

Comments welcome!  How do you think you will use your first flash storage (beyond thumb drives)?  Have you already?

Actual enterprise drive reliability meets expectations

One failure in a million hours?  It’s claims like these that seem extreme to some people when they look at enterprise disk drives.  Yet a study of 39,000 NetApp systems by a researcher have found that these drives fail at a 1% annual failure rate (AFR).  Robin Harris summarizes the study in his blog.

The translation from AFR to MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) is not exact, but this AFR number puts MTBF in the million-hour ballpark,  showing that disk drive specifications do indeed portray actual reliability performance.

It’s hard to test for a failure every 1.6 million hours

This is not an exact science, because to prove that any one drive will only fail on average every 1.6 million hours (the spec for the Seagate Savvio drive), you’d have to run a whole bunch of drives a whole bunch of years.  This study is a nice real-world validation!

Xserve RAID is out at Apple: Promise Vtrak is in

StorageMojo reports on Apple’s decision to drop the Xserve RAID storage system.  Seems like its beauty was only skin deep.

Goes to show that being pretty is a great strategy for consumers, but not so much for business. A smart and pragmatic decision by Apple.

Replaced by Vtrak from Promise

Apple is offering the Promise Vtrak system in its place.  Comments on Robin’s blog suggest that Apple is making this move now to get it out before their update to Final Studio Cut software.  You can take a look at it on Promise’s site here. 

The A/V production space is huge. Apple is wise to do what it takes to maintain a strong position in this market. 

Content access time is the performance metric for Web 2.0 enterprise storage

A very cool entrant in the storage space: Atrato.  Think “black box” storage:  hundreds of 2.5″ drives, sealed in a 3-year maintenance-free containter that’s ”fail-in-place”  Does that mean it keeps working for 3 years despite losing a few drives along the way?  Let us know if you know.

Atrato is focused on instant access.  This is the high capacity content-serving equivalent of transactional performance for traditional enterprise applications.  Expect to see more solutions for Web 2.0 infrasctructure that are screaming fast, but in a new way.

Robin Harris has a nice analysis of their new idea and product here. 

By the way, Atrato is a river in Columbia that Atrato (the company) says is the fastest in the world.  Creative name choice!

A perfect storm for IBM in the enterprise storage space? 

There are a lot of startups in the storage world with mostly excellent technology, all struggling to break out.  IBM may have scored a coup with its acquisition of XIV by providing the business scale and market reach to propel Nextra into mainstream adoption. 

IBM’s marketing plus XIV’s technology, coupled with the fact that IBM doesn’t have EMC’s Symmetrix business to cannibalize, creates a market-changing Pivotal Moment in the enterprise storage space.  If IBM can move fast, they can achieve the market success in this segment that all of those startups mostly just gret to dream about.

Read what Robin Harris has to say on this.