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!
Scale-up
Scaling Storage In Conventional Arrays
It is amazing that something as simple-sounding as making an array get bigger can be so complex, yet scaling storage is notoriously difficult. Our storage protocols just weren’t designed with scaling in mind, and they lack the flexibility needed to dynamically address multiple nodes. So my hat is off to these companies and others who have come up with clever ways to maintain compatibility while scaling out beyond the bounds of a single storage array.
Scaling Storage Is Hard To Do
Data storage isn’t as easy as it sounds, especially at enterprise or cloud scale. It’s simple enough to read and write a bit of data, but much harder to build a system that scales to store petabytes. That’s why I’m keenly focused on a new wave of storage systems built from the ground up for scaling!