Storage magazine: seven years' proof of excellence

All things must pass, but it is with a heavy heart that I note that TechTarget‘s excellent Storage magazine has shipped its last issue. No official word has been posted by the company, but it is now widely reported. All print publications are feeling squeezed by a move to online readership which robs print of advertising revenue with its quicker turnaround and lower cost. Like its ancestor, Byte, and PC Magazine, Storage will continue online at searchstorage.com as well as through a controlled-circulation PDF newsletter. I do not yet know which of the excellent staff (writers, illustrators, and editors) of Storage will remain with these online efforts.

A History of Excellence

The final issue of Storage magazine was recently mailed - I grabbed a few extras if you want one!

Storage magazine was launched in March of 2002 to be “the best magazine dedicated to storage,” in the words of Editor in Chief, Mark Schlack, and it was. It stood out from the crowd right away, with square “perfect” binding and high-quality printing and design. Inside that first issue, one was greeted by fresh and engaging layout and artwork that was both clever and humorous. These would become the trademark of the magazine.

But content was king at Storage, and this is the area with which I am most proud to have been associated. The very first issue featured insightful pieces by Steve Duplessie, Rich Friedman, Richard Scannell, Dennis Martin, Darryl Brooks, and others. They were joined by a who’s-who of the industry, including Jon Toigo, Marc Farley, Alan Radding, Jerome Wendt, W. Curtis Preston, Jim Damoulakis, Tony Prigmore, Marc Staimer, Randy Kerns, and Tom Halfhill, and that was just in the first year! Just about every independent voice in the industry was represented over the next six years.

It was precisely that independence that brought credibility to the magazine. Although they eventually ended their provocative Behind the Firewall insider-tips page, they never allowed the magazine to become an advertorial. Like the companion Storage Decisions conference and seminar series, TechTarget managed both to remain editorially independent and to gather strong support from the industry. No doubt it was the wisdom and experience of the editorial staff, Schlack, Friedman, and Rich Castagna, who ensured balance rather than cheerleading or FUD to dominate the pages. They received recognition, as well: Just look at TechTarget’s award page for a list of “bests”!

My Own Experience

Storage impressed with its design, illustrations, and photography as well as its editorial excellence

Storage even found a place for yours truly in their pages: I wrote the Integration column every other month for two years before moving to the Best Practices column through 2007. I also contributed almost a dozen feature articles over the years, the last of which just missed the final issue. I was proud to be listed as a Contributing Editor for all of those years as well, and gave everything I could to keep Storage “the best,” including quoted commentary in many issues.

Every one of my interactions with Storage magazine was positive. The editors always knew how to edit my work to bring out the best. Although I am not truly a journalist, I have learned many things from Mark, Rich, Rich, and the others. And I remain honored to be listed alongside the luminaries whose work appeared next to mine.

I also want to call attention to the standout look of the magazine: I talked to many of the photographers featured on the pages, having had my own photo taken a few times as well as my editorial subjects, and they were truly professionals, drawing out the best in us. The illustrations that graced my columns and articles deserve repeated praise, too, always amazing me with their clever twists on what I wrote.

Storage magazine deserves its place in the enterprise storage industry, as well as the publishing world in general. But more importantly, it earned a place on my bookshelf, and it will remain there. I cannot praise it higher. Thanks for seven great years, and I look forward to working with TechTarget and the excellent staff of Storage in the future!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Remembering Storage Magazine
This post was categorized as Computer History, Enterprise storage, Personal, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Although deduplication of storage is nothing new, with Data Domain and other making hay with the technique for years, it has never been ready for prime time – reduction of active primary storage applications like email and databases. Instead, deduplication has been relegated to second- or third-tier status, deduplicating archives and backup data. But change is in the air, and deduplication vendors are starting to bustle towards the bright lights of primary storage.

Stone Knives and Bear Skins

We have all been here before, of course. Back at the dawn of the personal computer era, data compression was a hot topic of conversation. I recall being so impressed by an article in Byte (1986:5, p99) outlining Huffman coding that I tried cooking up an implementation in Atari BASIC. Lossless compression has a magical pull to the geek in many of us – redundant data just wants to be eliminated!

Stacker dominated the disk compression world - until Microsoft introduced DOS 6.0

Companies soon applied compression to primary storage, especially the limited storage in personal computers. Stacker was a hit after 1990, until Microsoft built a workalike, called DoubleSpace, into DOS 6.0 in 1993, leading to a historical lawsuit. I personally used the ADDSTOR disk compression built into DR-DOS 6.0 to stretch two more years out of the 20 MB MFM hard drive in my AT&T PC6300 at WPI.

But something funny happened in the late 1990s: Compression began to lose its luster. Compressing data always takes quite a bit of CPU power, but this was offset somewhat by the truncated data transfers and more-efficient file system layout afforded in early PCs. But as disks got larger and faster, using precious CPU time to save space seemed less and less compelling. Today, although nearly every operating system includes built-in compression of files, folders, or perhaps disks, these features are rarely used. And compression was never popular in the performance-sensitive enterprise space.

Deduplication Has a Nice Ring

Although traditional fine-grained compression has not been very successful in the enterprise, its lanky cousin, single-instance storage, has long found niche jobs. Applications from databases to email systems to file servers have long had the ability to recognize to requests to store the exact same file or record, and to store just a single instance in this case. Even file systems have the ability to do single instance storage through the use of links, though this is initiated by the user rather than in an automated fashion.

In the late 1990s, FilePool began developing a content-addressable storage device, which was acquired by EMC in 2001. This device, later known as the Centera, was one of a number of storage platforms targeted at the archiving market introduced this decade. At the same time, virtual tape libraries made the jump from the mainframe to open systems. Both devices, being outside the critical path of performance but offering massive capacity, were well-suited to implement advanced capacity optimization technologies that combined the concepts of compression with single-instance storage. Thus was created the modern world of data deduplication.

What we think of as deduplication is neither fish nor fowl: It assesses larger “chunks” of data than compression technologies, delivering greater capacity savings and potentially reducing performance impact, but is more flexible than single-instancing, recognizing the similarities within files or objects.

But it is still maddeningly difficult to scale deduplication while maintaining performance. Rather than fight to maintain reasonable write throughput, most deduplication products have switched to post-processing, deferring their work to quieter times.

It’s Not Just for Breakfast

Regardless of their methods or underlying technology, no deduplication vendor has stood up to support challenging low-latency or high-throughput production applications, however. NetApp was the first to raise the issue of support for production applications, but although they tout the technology for VMware, they haven’t exactly been shouting from the rooftops to get their A-SIS deduplication technology deployed in other high-I/O applications. And I haven’t seen Hifn’s card yet.

Yesterday, I mentioned that greenBytes was adding deduplication to their ZFS-based storage array for primary data. And now Riverbed has fired another shot over the bow, repurposing their (deduplicating) WAN accelerator product for primary (file) storage. They might be able to pull it off, too, since they have a long list of customers who are already enjoying the technology in production. It’s not a stretch to suggest that Riverbed’s appliances can scale to handle production data loads. Although it’s file-only, I can imagine quite a few scenarios where this tech could really yield benefits. Could we come full-circle, with deduplication finally reaching the enterprise storage world?

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Deduplication Coming to Primary Storage
This post was categorized as Computer History, Enterprise storage, Features, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.