I posted a rather lengthy entry about this topic on my blog recently http://joergsstorageblog.blogspot.com, but I thought that I would summarize it here as well.

Virtualization Changes Everything

I keep hearing this, and to some extent, it’s true, but on the other hand, if you have been around storage you also see a lot of similarities to the issues that we always had to deal with as storage admins/managers. The main difference with VMWare is that you might find that it’s even more important that you address the following three issues: read more …

The inconvenient truth about data centers is that they consume lots of power. In addition to running a building-full of systems and storage devices 24/7, power is also consumed for networking equipment, cooling, battery backups, and even to support more modest human needs, such as lights and coffee makers. read more …

Many discussions in The Future of Storage have focused on the relative merits of one protocol or another, but I have been pleased to see a few touch on the core issue at hand: We continue to patch together a system based on outdated concepts. Most storage protocols continue to mimic direct attached storage, and most of our so-called networks act as point to point channels. An ultra-modern virtualized storage infrastructure with all the latest bells and whistles still holds the concepts of block and file at its core. Whenever the storage industry has tried to bring about real storage management they have been stymied by a lack of context for data. No amount of virtualization, and no new protocol, will fix this. Put simply, we need a storage revolution. read more …

You’ve probably heard the buzz-word “Cloud Computing” tossed around recently.  Cloud Computing is the next big thing in remote and distributed computing and is very much in fashion now for many industry bellwethers like IBM, Sun, Amazon, Google and storage giants like EMC.  You don’t have to have a degree in IT to see it coming together.  If you’ve played around with Gmail or Google Docs, even as an end user, you’ve already seen the beginnings of something big, really big.  As with any budding new market however, there are a lot more questions than answers these days, perhaps because the possibilities are seemingly infinite.  Let’s take a quick gander at a basic high level understanding of how the cloud works and what the building blocks are.

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SAN for video is poised to become a key market.  Innovation in this space will affect data compression, content delivery, and other major storage and file sharing concerns.

Here’s a brief review of four popular integrated solutions for high performance video editing as well as other large file sharing applications such as broadcast media, film, and medical imagery: read more …

If you’re like me, then your first thoughts after discovering thin provisioning were similar to: “Hmm, that sounds like my SAN space is getting out of control.” Nobody likes the idea of losing precise overview of his systems. And that’s what thin provisioning does — while the array promised 100TB of space to you (on your command, of course) it actually only has six 1TB drives inside. What if I fill them up? I decided to test it for you and show what happens to a Windows server system when a thin-provisioned LUN runs out of physically available space. read more …

This post has been syndicated from The Server Room, Ars Technica’s new community for IT professionals. It was inspired by a post from Steve Foskett. In his post, Foskett tries to make the case for the “Home SAN.”

While I’m not convinced that the answer to all my home storage problems is a “SAN,” like Foskett proposes, I do agree that something has to be done. 

I have a lot of networked storage in my house. Various iPhones and iPods, a Mac Mini, three laptops, an AppleTV, a NAS device, multiple Firewire drives attached to the laptops, and the list goes on. I haven’t done the math to total it all up, but by the time I upgrade my NAS this summer I’ll have at least 5TB total of storage scattered throughout my home, tucked away in pockets, purses, briefcases, entertainment centers, closets, and other nooks and crannies. Living amidst this much hardware might sound great, but parts of the experience get old. In particular, I’m really, really tired of managing all these “disks.” I’m tired of manually syncing and copying and things between one disk or partition and another, and I wish every gadget in my house was part of one big virtual filesystem—a “storage cloud,” if you will—that would liberate me from the curse of constantly syncing. read more …

One of the things I love about the storage industry is the continual emergence of innovative technology. New features in our market can go from inception to implementation in as little as 18 months. Seeing this continuous hyper-evolution of storage features, it has occurred to me that the storage industry doesn’t really innovate at all, it mimics existing innovations. No, not mimicking the technology itself, but the evolution of the technology. Let me explain.

Remember back in 1997 when 10-megabit Ethernet was the new kid on the block? The ISP I worked at finally dumped our antiquated hubs and bought a shiny new USRobotics 10-megabit switch for our core network. Soon after that came 100-megabit hubs, then 100-megabit switches, then core switches with backplanes, so on and so forth.

Then something special happened. Switches weren’t just switches anymore. Now they had integrated routers, packet filters, intrusion detection, cache engines and load balancers. Switches were becoming intelligent. These days, the network switch does a lot more than simply network things together.

Compare that to the evolution of Fibre Channel switches over the last 8 years. See any similarities? read more …