This year for my Truth in IT seminars, I’m shifting away from virtualization to focus on enterprise storage once again. But this won’t be any ordinary “storage 101” seminar. Rather than trying to talk about every element, I’m focused on what’s new!
Next-generation storage technologies are here, from the smallest startups to the established players. For 2014, I’ll focus on the following key components:
- Major changes in enterprise storage
- Integration and storage smarts
- Scaling storage beyond the array
- Alternatives to enterprise storage arrays
Here’s a bit more about each component!
Everything In Storage Is Changing: Are You Ready?
After decades of boring sameness, enterprise storage is about to explode. Old concepts are being pushed aside and upstart vendors have the technical edge. Your enterprise storage infrastructure will soon look entirely different, as RAID, SCSI, and even the concept of a storage array disappears. Next-generation data centers will feature object protocols, storage integrated with hypervisors and converged infrastructure, and private clouds. This isn’t a pipe dream: Everything we talk about exists today and will gain importance in the coming years!
Flash! Storage Isn’t Slow and Stupid Anymore
The old-fashioned concept of storage was simple: Dump it all to disk. But all this is changing as storage moves from disk arrays to integrated flash memory. The new infrastructure includes solid-state storage in arrays, in the network, and in the server, with a new generation of intelligence to make everything work together. Disks and tapes still have their place, but that place has changed!
Bigger Than Disks, Controllers, and Shelves: From Terabytes to Petabytes
With solid state storage becoming the primary application tier, where does the bulk data go? RAID and arrays are just too small as data gets bigger and bigger! It’s difficult to scale conventional storage systems, so the industry is turning to new concepts like object and cloud storage. We’ll discuss how these new “big data” systems can be built and used.
The End of the Storage Array?
The storage array faces an existential threat from new distributed storage technologies. Virtual storage arrays are appearing alongside guest virtual machines and an era of integrated storage solutions like vSAN is coming from VMware and others. We’ll talk about the technologies that make all this possible, from the hypervisors and VSA to the PCI Express bus and InfiniBand. Then there’s the prospect of converged infrastructure, which combines servers and storage in a single appliance with commodity components and Ethernet linking everything together.
Next-generation storage is all about integration, scale, and performance
Summing up the day, we will present the new vision for storage, where intelligent integration, massive scale, and performance matters most. No longer a dumb repository, storage will be a key component of the entire infrastructure stack. But this future storage won’t look like anything we’ve seen before.
If all this next-generation storage stuff excites you, you’ve got to be part of my 2014 seminar series! Talk to the folks at Truth in IT and they’ll help you join me this year!
My first Seminar date are as follows:
- Tue. Feb 4, 2014 – Seattle
- Thu. Feb 6, 2014 – San Francisco