Looking around at the enterprise storage landscape, it is plain that certain archetypes rule: Monolithic enterprise arrays, dual-controller modular arrays, standard-sized hard disk units, NAS servers, tape libraries. Are these really the optimal designs for storage in our modern open systems world?

On the contrary, I suggest that the enterprise storage world we know was shaped by singular innovative products of the past. Without these, the IT world might look very different.

So let’s take a walk through history, identifying the ten most innovative and important enterprise storage hardware products. But let me note first that this list could be 100 items long, and we all have our favorites. Lots of the storage blogging world contributed their ideas, too! Continue Reading »

This is part of an ongoing series of longer articles I will be posting every Sunday as part of an experiment in offering more in-depth content.

Many storage challenges focus on correlating high-level uses of data (such as applications) with the nuts and bolts of storage infrastructure. These discussions often revolve around the conflict between data management, which demands an ever-smaller unit of management, and storage management, which benefits most from consolidation. Developing data management capability that is both granular enough for applications and scalable enough for storage is one key to the future of storage.

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Based on Floral Matryoshka by BrokenSphere/Wikimedia Commons

My February 2003 column for Storage magazine focused on the surprising difficulty of measuring storage utilization. I wrote:
 

“A true measurement of utilization would reflect every layer of usage metrics - from raw disk in a shared array to used storage within files. Raw storage for each new frame of reference is contained within the used storage measured above it, so low utilization is compounded as we move deeper into the stack.”

In that column, I suggested that utilization of any resource was based on just three metrics:

1. Raw
2. Usable
3. Used

But this is confounded by the frame of reference being measured. It’s trivially simple to determine the raw, usable, and used capacity for a storage array, server, or database. But what happens when one tries to measure storage utilization all the way through the stack? Continue Reading »

This is part of an ongoing series of longer articles I will be posting every Sunday as part of an experiment in offering more in-depth content.

Although many discussions in the storage industry focus on the relative merits of one protocol or another, the conversation occasionally turns to 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. Continue Reading »

This is part of an ongoing series of longer articles I will be posting every Sunday as part of an experiment in offering more in-depth content.

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.

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Data Robotics today introduced the second generation of what I think of as a personal storage array, but although the Drobo 2 offers great enhancements, making it a top choice for those needing massive and protected storage on a single computer, it’s still not what I’m looking for in a home storage device.

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There has been lots of talk about the Data Robotics (aka Drobo) SOHO “storage robot”
- whoever they have doing their marketing deserves a raise! When I first heard about it, I was pretty puzzled - Why care about yet another storage enclosure, especially an overly expensive one that doesn’t even have NAS features? On closer examination, I have become a believer in the potential of the device and the company. Drobo offers some key ingredients that promise future success to me: a clear focus on usability, novel thinking to solve a real-world problem, and that great marketing I mentioned earlier. Click through for the full story… Continue Reading »

Anyone paying attention knows I’m not particular sanguine about the near-term prospects for solid-state disks (SSDs) and hybrid hard disk drives (H-HDDs) in the enterprise storage space, but I’m not foolish enough to discount them entirely. With that in mind, it’s worthwhile noting the debut of the first commercially-available retail(ish) SATA SSD from SanDisk. Read more below… Continue Reading »

Garth Gibson, author of the seminal paper which presented the redundant array of inexpensive independent disks (RAID) to the world, has a nice quick interview over at eWeek. It’s worth a read, since Gibson’s long been on the forefront of storage tech.

He talks about how parallel NFS (pNFS) is set to trickle down to the enterprise from the high-performance compute labs. It’s always amusing to me to think of things trickling down to the enterprise storage market, but in this case he’s right - massive clusters (and Panasas for that matter) have yet to make much of a mark on the enterprise computing world.

He goes on to talk about how escalating disk capacity has lead to unacceptable rebuild times in RAID sets. You tell ‘em, Garth! Apparently, he’s been beating the multiple-parity drum since 1989 (!?!) - I hadn’t realized that RAID 6 was that old, since it’s not in the paper, but he claims they invented it, too, way back when. Who am I to contradict the Bob Metcalfe of storage?