I was in the market recently to deploy few dedicated servers for a solution and one of the servers happened to require large amounts of storage (in the range of a few terabytes). After scoping out a bit, I figured my choices were to deploy a single storage server (with a large number of disks, typically SATA since they give higher capacity) or buy capacity on a SAN. The problem with putting all storage on a single server was its inscalability as the system would grow. A SAN on the other hand required expensive set up and higher fees. It was the most flexible option though. Eventually I decided to use neither. The solution was to modify our software to utilize an array or storage servers in the network where each server would have a few hundred GBs of disk space on RAID drives. We found this to be cheaper and readily deployable by our partners who had lots of unused servers they bought in 2007 or prior years. I think this form of storage is similar to Storage grids or clouds using commonly available servers (with no special drives or availability mods). We also could distribute these servers all over the internet in various borrowed data centers which is quite cool.

As a current user of storage virtualization, I couldn’t feel stronger
about the strategic place this has in today’s datacenter. Living with
such a rapidly changing/evolving technology such as SAN storage, has its
own inherent limitations in some of the key benefits and features it is
intended to provide. Technical requirements for where you can use things
like Flash Copy, what types of storage can be pooled together, etc.
force admins into purchasing decisions and technical directions. I don’t
know about you, but I do not like being forced down any technical
roadmap!

Many vendors offer this technology today, and they all have subtle
differences. But there are some key features they all have in common,
and I would highly recommend anyone who is not currently using this, to
take a long hard look at it. read more …

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.

read more …