Stephen has written an excellent article discussing the topic that I believe most directly impacts IT today, and that is the architecture of “Traditional” Storage. When the most granular element in your design becomes a disk drive (you may write to a block but are limited to a drive because of RAID sets) your flexibility is shot and volume of data kills you.

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Data continues to grow at a frightening rate. According to an IDC study there was about 281 Exabytes of data stored on disk in 2007 word wide. This data is growing at CAGR of about 70%. At this rate, in 3 years there will be about 1400 Exabytes of data sitting on disk.

Now, a lot of this data is sitting on people’s desktops, laptops, ipods, phones, digital cameras, etc. right now. However, things like cloud storage will change all of that. Heck, we are seeing some of the change right now with things like social networking sites, photo sharing sites, etc.  IDC says that for 85% of that data a corporate entity will be responsible for the protection and security of the data.

So, in the future, we are going to have to store a lot more data than we do today, a LOT more data. How are we going to do that? Just the physical aspect of getting exabytes of data on the floor is going to be a challenge. I don’t even want to talk about protecting and managing that much data. But for now, I want to talk about the density of the hard disk drive since that’s going to soon become the physical limit of what we can store on the floor of our data centers.

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I recently read a piece from Dave Altavilla relating insights of SATA enterprise.
I’d like to get the real scoop on exactly what status reporting and error handling capabilities exist in SAS that do not exist in SATA. the list if you please.

Also I’m very interested in the improved reliabilty of the Seagate Baracuda ES2 SAS vs ES2 SATA. exactly why is one more reliabile than the other?

It has been the core technology behind the storage industry since day one, but the sun is setting on traditional RAID technology. After two decades of refinement and fragmentation, we are abandoning the core concepts of disk-centric data protection as storage and servers go virtual. Next-generation storage products will feature refined and integrated capabilities based on pools of storage rather than combinations of disk drives, and we will all benefit from improved reliability and performance.

RAID Classic

Early storage systems were revolutionary, in physically removing storage from the CPU, in enabling sharing of storage between multiple CPUs, and especially in virtualizing disk drives using RAID. When Patterson, Gibson, and Katz proposed the creation of a redundant array of inexpensive disks (RAID) in 1987, they specified five numbered “levels”. Each level had its own features and benefits, but all centered on the idea that a static set of disk drives would be grouped together and presented to higher-level systems as a single drive. Storage devices, as a rule, mapped host data back to these integral disk sets, sometimes sharing a single RAID group among multiple “LUNs”, but never spreading data more broadly. Storage has remained stuck with small sets of drives ever since.

The core insight of the 1980s remains true: More spindles means better performance. Although additional overhead dulls the impact somewhat, the benefit of spreading data across multiple drives can be tremendous. A typical RAID set offers much better performance than the drives alone, and can handle a mechanical failure as a bonus.

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Don’t misunderstand me, I love virtualization.  With any technology, we weigh the benefits of it against the cost and viability of implementation.  Sometimes we focus too much on virtualization or the protocols and the upper layers of proposed ideas.  We might completely overlook the lower layer benefits that technologies such as FCoE could provide, such as the ease of wiring and running patch panels.  This gives data centers massive flexibility.  It would eliminate the need to worry about what type of wiring will go where and having to “homerun” every type of new cable that comes out.

Convenience Killed The Cat?

As I’ve stressed before, I feel this convergence should be focused on the physical medium with the most potential like fiber cable rather than twisted pair copper.  Regardless, we must not forget the importance of convenience.  Several markets such as cell phones and even websites forego performance in favor of convenience.  I would like to think that we will continue to stave off that rationale in the IT storage industry, but it does pull a lot of weight.  Convenience is good, but an even bigger factor is the reality that consumers want all of their information right away.  We all need to be a bit more curious, look at the big picture, and question the status quo.

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We’ve spent time in the trenches with folks in the Enterprise space asking for our advice on whether SATA-based storage is ready for prime time in the datacenter or if it’s still really just a consumer level technology that has no business in mission critical applications.  We always give them a simple, straight-forward answer that to be honest, sounds like a cop-out but in reality
it couldn’t be more true; it all depends on your application. Are you really dealing with mission critical data or can you live with an iota of down time? read more …

At the Brocade Tech Day briefing to analysts, Brocade presented a set of slides. One of them (Page 62) said (and I quote):

“The FC incumbent has a huge advantage in being the FCoE vendor of choice. Like today’s FC networks, we do not expect mixed vendor FCoE-FC networks.”

Storage is a serious business, and everyone is very concerned about compatibility and interoperability. So much so, that they will buy more of the vendor that they already have and ignore the interoperability. Brocade knows that and is planning for it. Now, to me, that sounds like an opportunity to charge more, and make more profit, for very little effort.

Those storage folks must love being bunnies.

A deeply cynical observer would conclude that Brocade feels that FCoE locks customers in to their product and can’t wait to get their hands on the money. In fact, they believe it enough to suggest it to their investors.

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Our industry has made long strides in recent years.  There is no need for it to make a drastic change in its designs or how it does business, like some of our troubled domestic automakers.  Companies are buying all of the various offerings from the big storage vendors, and even some of the small ones.  It’s a growing market, and “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.

At least that’s the attitude that most companies will have when they’re asked if they will implement a new-fangled technology for their existing SANs.  Most firms have their critical systems on a SAN, and unless  there is a real need to, will not forklift upgrade their existing SANs.  That leaves the new technologies to attract  new clients, such as small business and small-to-medium enterprises (SME).  iSCSI is catching their eye now, and sure maybe FCoE will catch it later.  The key is still having devices that more than one protocol and interface, such as  those that use FC and iSCSI in order to attract the new but retain customers with existing investments.  Later perhaps, it will shift to FCoE and iSCSI, possibly Infiniband.  As a sidenote, I see the most bandwidth potential with fiber and Infiniband rather than copper.  Plus the cost of fiber continues to go down while copper costs are going up.  Fiber is smaller, but then again so was “Betamax”. read more …