Storage: Services in the cloud will meet tomorrow's storage needs
Storage remains a bear to manage -- and few signs point to significant improvement. The solution? Let someone else do it.
Storage remains a bear to manage -- and few signs point to significant improvement. The solution? Let someone else do it.
The speed of optical-grade broadband is beginning to reach our homes, at least those lucky enough to live in areas covered by Verizon's FiOS (fiber-optic service) or similar offerings.
The data that we send over wires travels between two-thirds and three-quarters the speed of light, depending on the medium. Within the LAN, transfers from point A to point B appear to be immediate, with less than a millisecond delay.
Not only has the multimedia revolution increased our appetite for storage, but it has also beefed up our portions, as average file sizes just keep getting bigger every day.
Every time I hear a pitch for an SMB backup solution it comes complete with a chilling statistic that suggests smaller companies are tone-deaf to data protection.
It hasn't happened to me so far (fingers crossed), but I imagine there are very few things more disturbing than having your personal information put at risk because someone lost or misplaced a tape cartridge or a laptop.
Are you satisfied with your storage gear? If not, you might find what you need from two vendors not normally associated with storage: NEC and Stratus.
The storage industry isn't necessarily known for being a fast mover. Take for example <a href="http://www.idema.org/_smartsite/modules/local/data_file/show_file.php?cmd=download&data_file_id=1263">this memo, dated October 2003</a> (it's in Microsoft Word format), in which Seagate made clear the need to move the physical block size of disk drives to 4,096 bytes instead of 512 bytes.
Let's take a trip to the future this week. Imagine that we travel forward in time -- say, 100 years from now. How will the technological landscape of storage change in one century? What will our descendants think of the state of our technology?
FC, SCSI, SAS, SATA ... the alphabet soup of different connectivity protocols for disk drives can be confusing. Why do we have so many? The simple answer is because new technologies like SATA and SAS pop up fast, old technologies like SCSI do not disappear as quickly.
A newly proposed standard, dubbed FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet), aims to bring together the efficiency of the FC (Fibre Channel) transport and the ubiquity of Ethernet.
Have you read "The Expanding Digital Universe"? It's a study, commissioned by EMC and put together by IDG analyst group, IDC, on the amount of digital data that we can expect to see in the next few years.
Many companies would embrace the superior performance and enhanced reliability of clustered storage were it not for the fear that adoption would cost a fortune and lock them into proprietary hardware.
No other storage topic is more sensitive for vendors and more important for potential customers than performance measurement. I've had vendors refuse to send me a product for review because of disagreements on which speed benchmarks to use during the evaluation.
This year in storage seems to be ending exactly as it started -- very busily. And it's a pattern that will continue in 2007, no doubt about that.