The greatest change that the SAN market could make is to jump from the exclusivity of the enterprise into the home market.

As the multi media home starts to develop and more and more devices enter the space previously occupied by the PC a cost effective SAN would become the centre of the home. read more …

The future of storage is a really wide, and open ended topic. I’ve been in the data center/systems administration/storage business for 30 years, so I can look back a long way. The one thing that’s been a constant during all that time is that things change, and they change in ways we never expected at the time.

So looking very far into the future is going to be rife with speculation and in most cases just plain wrong. But what I think we can do is look at current technology which is just being introduced, and make some intelligent guesses about how it might be used in the very near future, say within the next couple of years. read more …

I have been evaluating FCoE for a while now, and been researching the technology for my latest project. It’s a fine technology, if you believe in Fibrechannel. I believe it has some nice features, and will offer customers some very compelling reasons to purchase.

But if you stand back and look at the market space at a whole, I cannot perceive that FCoE will be successful. Here are my reasons. read more …

Writing about storage virtualization, I should start by defining which virtualization I mean. Generally, a simple RAID volume can be called “virtual” too as it is a logical representation of some more complex logic behind it. Don’t worry, I’m not going to write about RAID. Instead, my mind is full of mirrors, snapshots, clusters, recovery sites and a single question: At which layer of SAN infrastructure these features should live? read more …

Hi, I’m Bryan from Dell’s enterprise HDD/SSD marketing. The IT world has started making big moves over from 3.5” 15K SAS over to 2.5” 10K & 15K. Times they are a changing, but we don’t need to start the swan song for 3.5” 15K just yet. 2.5” SAS has a lot going for it and I’m not trying to argue that. 2.5” 10K/15K SAS brings nearly a 2-to-1 power benefit over equivalent capacities in 3.5” 15K and also has a significant IOPS performance advantage if you can double the drive count within the same rack space.

Does this mean 3.5” 15K is dying or dead? No way, not yet. read more …

This post has been syndicated from The Server Room, Ars Technica’s new community for IT professionals. This article on cloud storage is part of an ongoing topics and discussions related to IT and storage technology.

This past Monday, managed hosting company RackSpace announced that a subsidiary of theirs, Mosso, is currently beta testing a “cloud storage” service that will compete with Amazon’s S3. Priced identically with S3 ($0.15/GB per month), Mosso’s CloudFS will add another line to the ever-expanding menu of ways that users can keep files on remote, distributed, redundant storage. What the announcement and subsequent press coverage didn’t highlight, however, is how Mosso actually got into the cloud storage game in the first place. For a managed hosting provider that’s already in the business of building, deploying, and managing servers, rolling out a cloud storage solution wasn’t a hardware problem as much as it was a software problem.

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Many companies have not yet deployed SANs in their data centers. They will likely look to iSCSI because it has been around the block and is a proven technology, with decreased cost and a lesser learning curve than FC switched fabric. However are Ethernet and twisted pair near the end of its roadmap for bandwidth? CAT7 requires more costly shielded twisted pair and before you know it we’ll be back to fiber. Why aren’t we hearing more about Infiniband? It seems to have great potential for low-latency big-bandwidth. Is it fear of the unknown, is it too new? With its open standard, it may do for interconnections what LTO did for tape drives. read more …

I have been researching iSCSI implementations on the server to try and understand the difference between them and to come to grips with how they work. This article looks to compare the various methods of connecting to a iSCSI network.

It seems that many people do not know or understand that the generation and transmission of IP packets is CPU-intensive process. In some operating systems, it can also be very latent since there are many transfers across the memory bus and the PCI bus before the data is actually transmitted. read more …

This community has forced me to think of what the next big things in storage areas could be. At first, I thought of protocols, so I wrote an insight about mirroring and some feature-related things. What I forgot completely was the core of current SANs — drives.

Last year, I had a great opportunity to evaluate a DRAM-based array. To me, testing new arrays and running IOmeter tests on them reminds me of my childhood feelings after being given a new Lego box. This time — meaning with the the array, not with the Lego — I was excited by sequential throughput speeds close to 900MBps through a pair of fibres. We changed the test to 100% random pattern and guess what — the performance was almost the same! read more …

My initial thinking, which I now realize was flawed, was that the deduplication aspect of the SAN Market would become insignificant thanks to the twin factors of plummetting storage costs, increased processing speeds, and robust cloud computing storage environments like Amazon S3. However I now see that despite these major advances several factors make deduplication a key part of any robust SAN implementation: read more …