Storage Nation

There is a growing need for specialized storage servers to provide functions like Network Attached Storage (NAS) over Internet protocols, Content Archives, enterprise document management, Virtual tape Libraries (VTL), deduplication, low cost modular storage, high availability enterprise storage, etc. While storage servers provide benefits for the management and preservation of certain types of data, it can create storage/server sprawl and increase the fragmentation of data center resources if these services are delivered as standalone storage and server bundles

After my last post on Data Center Transformation Part 4: Dynamic Provisioning, where I talked about the benefits of Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning, Lucas Mearian published a Computerworld Article “ A waste of Space: Bulk of drive capacity still underutilized – Most companies can reclaim as much as 60% of their storage Capacity with Monitoring and thin provisioning tool ” In this article he observed that the low utilization of storage capacity is still a rampant problem even though tools like thin provisioning are available today to monitor usage and thin provision storage. While a recent survey from TheInfoPro showed as many as 50% of Fortune 1000 companies were using thin provisioning or were planning to do so, other analysts like Forrester’s Andrew Reichman contend that companies are not using these tools and utilization of storage is still between 20 to 40%. While he did say that thin provisioning was not being used for thin provisioning he did observe that it was being used for striping performance which is a result of writing data in chunks across many disk drives. According to this article thin provisioning can reclaim up to 60%

Those of you who subscribe to Gartner reports may have seen their recent report: “ Choosing Between Monolithic Versus Modular Storage: Robustness, Scalability and Price Are the Tiebreakers ” While I agree with some of their definitions of monolithic and modular storage, it is no longer a question of one versus the other. With the Hitachi USP V/VM we combine the best of both worlds, by providing a “monolithic” or enterprise tier 1 front-end with lower cost modular back-end storage. I agree with their description of monolithic storage as having many controllers that share direct access to a large, high performance, global cache, supporting a large number of host connections, including mainframes, and providing redundancy to ensure high availability and reliability. I also agree with their definition of modular storage, which contains two variants, a dual controller architecture with separate cache memory and a scale out architecture that can have many nodes with separate caches in each node.

I have been heads down building out a couple of websites.  In addition to adding a lot of new content to C4Project.org (fresh interviews with Fujifilm, CA, and Xiotech), I am re-doing IT-Sense.org and will shortly tackle my main homepage and the Data Management Institute site.  The objective is to freshen content and update code that has proven hacker-porous.  Stand

Tech Target is taking a video they shot of my last DR Planning seminar and is streaming it on the Internet right now.  Here are the details I received after pinging the site.

This is the third part in my series on data center transformations. My last post was on server transformation and the impact of virtual servers on the data center. In this post I will address the impact of storage transformation on the data center. Data is at the core of the Data center Data is at the core of the data center, and any effort to transform the data center must involve the movement, provisioning, access, and protection of data which is provided by storage systems

This is the second post in my series on data center transformation. In my first post , I offered up several warning signs that indicate why it is time to take action and transform your data center to be agile, sustainable, and business-oriented.

There is an increasing interest in storage virtualization as seen an the increasing number of articles and blog posts on storage virtualization. In the last few days Rick Vanover posted a very balanced overview of storage virtualization for Datamation where he reviewed some of the many options.   Carol Sliwa posted a Storage Pro Guide to block-based storage virtualization for SearchStorage which cited some use cases. One of the use cases was the City of Coquitlan (Canada) who is a 2010 Computerworld Honors Laureate award winners in IDG’s Computerworld Honors Program and a customer of Hitachi.

Hopefully, some of the Xiotech folks have their ears on.  In response to my previous post questioning the marketecture around Flash SSD, one reader (Pq65) said that my commentary underscored Xiotech’s limitations in the sense that they (1) are closely tied to Seagate, which doesn’t have a Flash story yet, and (2) were not jumping on

Last week Hitachi Data Systems held their first blogger day, which was attended by 10 bloggers who cover the IT space.