Storage Nation

Chuck Hollis had an excellent post last week, discussing caching.   About 10 years ago a small team that I was a part of looked at starting a company that would do something similar to what IBM's SVC does.  The idea was to create a SAN front end controller with a lot of cache memory that would virtualize  "downstream" storage and provide performance boosts through various techniques such as caching, striping, and multi-way mirroring.  We gave up on the idea when it became apparent to us that the project was quite a bit larger than we initially thought and it was unclear when we would ever have sufficient resources to get a competitive product to market. I think we could have sold the idea to venture capital investors who were throwing money at storage startups, but we couldn't sell it to ourselves. For those of you that wonder why I tend to think SVC is an important product, that's why – I know some of the things IBM did to make it work and I admire their ability to bring it to market

Hitachi Data Systems has been very successful selling the benefits of Storage Virtualization and Dynamic Provisioning.

Netapp has been on the hot seat ever since Tom Georgens, their CEO commented that tiering would soon be obsolete . Since then, a number of people have called him out on it, including yours truly (in a steering wheel cam), StorageBod , The Storage Architect , StorageZilla , a storage blogging wannabe , and last but not least, the Storage Anarchis t .  To be fair, Georgens DID get support from the contrarian Drunken Data.  At the end of his post, the Storage Anarchist asks: Are they just defending their chosen path of Flash-as-cache instead of –as-a-tier? Or is it deeper than that? Is there something inherent in WAFL that makes it different to implement multiple different tiers within a single array

No, it's not a SWCSA rap, but it is a steering wheel cam, complete with a surprise ending- inspired by Stu @ at EMC .   

Late last night I got an email from  Christopher Kusek asking about FICON Encryption of data at rest. “Hey Hu, I was reading a post from 2008 whereby it was stated that there was a solution for data at rest encryption over FICON? http://blogs.hds.com/hu/2008/10/green_encryption_for_storage.html Can you provide a little insight into this, and whether this story is true and there infact is a FICON DAR encryption solution?” Thank you! Christopher I thought I would answer it in this blog since others may have a similar question.

IT costs are increasing about 7 to 8 % per year. But when you look at industry spend on storage hardware that spend has been flat for many years, primarily due to Moore’s law. Storage densities continue to double about every 18 months

SYSDBA is our excellent 3PAR business partner in South Africa ,  Some of their team came to 3PAR  headquarters recently and I had the chance to record this interview with Nick de Beer, a technology expert with a wide range of experiences including Oracle, storage and virtualization.  In this interview, Nick talks briefly about 3PAR's Recovery Manager software , which allows customers to recover data from many point in time snapshots.

EMC can't help themselves.  Given what appears to be a new corporate mandate to deny competitive threats in their massive propaganda machine , they look pretty stupid when one of those threats involves their new BFF Cisco and their trophy-acquisition raison d'etre ,VMware.    Yesterday, Netapp, Cisco and VMware made a planned, well-orchestrated announcement of their secure, multi-tenancy architecture.   Trust me – everyone in the industry knew it was coming and it was the main reason we chose to time our vSPhere and vCenter Server announcement for Monday this week. Chuck Hollis, EMC's StorageMonkeys poll winner , responded with an incredibly ignorant post that does not even mention the companies involved, nor does it link to any of the numerous online postings discussing it

The news is here:

While Cloud computing is touted as a new way to mask the complexity of the IT infrastructure and provide IT services as “a pay as you grow” service, these concepts  were introduced over 10 years ago with the service providers of the late 1990’s. These concepts were so appealing that they helped to fuel the dot com boom,  but disappeared in the dot com crash of 2001/2002. What has changed to make us think that a shared services model like cloud computing and cloud storage will be successful this time around? Key to the success of cloud storage providers, as with the dot com storage services providers (SSP) of earlier days, will be the ability to leverage their resources and be more efficient in managing the growth of storage compared to their end users.