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with economic certainty
lost in the mist - university data heads for the clouds
Editor:-
November 15, 2011 - the University of
Southern California (USC) will deploy over
8PB
of unstructured data on a private cloud managed by boxes and software from
Nirvanix.
Customer
spokesperson (CTO and Associate Dean of the USC Libraries) Sam Gustman said
"We shifted to the cloud
because it provides USC with a geographically diverse and cost-effective way of
storing, preserving and distributing our content on a truly global scale."
Hybrid Memory Cube will enable Petabyte SSDs
Editor:-
October 7, 2011 - Samsung
and Micron this
week launched a new industry
initiative - the Hybrid
Memory Cube Consortium - which will standardize a new module
architecture for memory chips - enabling greater density, faster bandwidth and
lower power.
"HMC is unlike anything currently on the radar,"
said Robert
Feurle, Micron's VP for DRAM Marketing. "HMC brings a new level of
capability to memory that provides exponential performance and efficiency gains
that will redefine the future of memory."
Editor's comments:-
HMC may enable SSD designers to pack 10x more
RAM capacity into the same
space with upto 15x the bandwidth, while using 1/3 the power due
to its integrated power management plane.
The same technology will
enable denser flash SSDs too - if flash is still around in 3 years' time and
hasn't been sucked into the obsolete market slime pit by the
lurking nv demons
which have been shadowing flash for the past 10 years and been waiting for each
"next generation" to stumble and be the last.
The power
management architecture integrated in HMC and the density scaling it allows
for packing memory chips (without heat build-up) are key technology enablers
which were listed as some of the problems the SSD industry needed to solve
in my 2010 article -
this way to the
Petabyte SSD.
Pure Storage has amassed $55 million for bulk FC SAN SSD storage
Editor:- August 24, 2011 - Pure Storage
yesterday unveiled its first SSD product line and announced it had received
$30 million in series C funding bringing its total capital funding up to $55
million.
Pure Storage 's
FlashArray
provides bulk / utility SSD storage for
FC SAN enviroments - which
by using inline dedupe and compression - can in some applications (25TB and 50K
IOPS per U) offer lower cost and yet still deliver higher performance than
classic hard drive disk arrays.
Editor's comments:- This
looks like a spreadsheet based value proposition rather than a disruptive new
product - and follows a market groove already established by
WhipTail Technologies
and Nimbus Data Systems.
The market for this type of SSD market will be huge - but along the way to
proving itself will have to fight off competition from
auto-tieing SSDs and
white box SSD RAID which
will nibble away at the same customer SSD budgets.
SolidFire launches SSD cloud appliances
Editor:-
June 21, 2011 - SolidFire
has announced details of its first product - an
iSCSI SSD appliance
designed for cloud storage
applications which the company says can scale to 1 petabyte capacity (which
takes 100 nodes with current models).
Performance within a SolidFire
system is virtualized separately from capacity, allowing cloud service providers
to prescribe and guarantee performance to every volume within the system.
Editor's
comments:- the company's
SolidFire
elements include features such as:- self healing data protection, always on
availability,
reservation-less thin provisioning , inline real time compression,
cloning and snapshots,
and dedupe, as
well as adjustable managed
IOPS and
throughput performance windows.
These are the essential
characteristics of what I called "bulk storage SSDs" in my article
roadmap to the
Petabyte SSD - although in that article what I had in mind is that by 2016
that a PB archive SSD library should fit into a single 2U rackmount.
If
that seems far fetched - remember that a lot of things can change in the SSD
market in 5 years.
5 years ago -
in 2006 - the enterprise server flash SSD market didn't exist. 2006 was
the 1st year of the
notebook SSD
market and there were only 36 makers of SSDs - compared to 300 today.
Compliance issues in Cloud Storage
Editor:- June
10, 2011 - A recent article in
InformationWeek.com
discusses the use of cloud
storage for
archiving.
Among
other things - the author George
Crump warns that - "The deletion of data from the cloud may be the
most overlooked consideration." ..read
the article
Editor's comments:- - judicious deletion
is also a strategic issue for long established web sites too. GerryMcGovern discussed that in
his classic article -
the
Business case for deleting content.
the future of data storage in broadcast and IPtv
Editor:-
January 23, 2011 -
the
future of data storage is the lofty sounding but aptly chosen title of a
new article published online today in Broadcast Engineering -
written by Zsolt
Kerekes editor of StorageSearch.com
(that's me).
It's a completely new article which synthesizes and
integrates concepts from several futuristic articles which have already
appeared here on the mouse site and wraps them into a cohesive whole. Anyone
who reads it will get a clear idea of where the incremental changes they read
about in storage news
pages are likely to end up. ...read
the article
All storage fails - design is choosing management preferences
Editor:-
January 4, 2011 -
the
Future of Storage in the Cloud is the title of a blog on
DataCenterPOST written by Patrick Baillie,
CEO of CloudSigma (based in
Zurich, Switzerland).
In it he discusses what he calls the "Myth
of the Failure Proof SAN" and his preferences for managing inevitable
failures.
Patrick Baillie says "When building out our cloud we
made the decision early that we preferred more frequent low impact problems than
infrequent high impact problems. Essentially we'd rather solve a simple small
problem which occurs more frequently (but still rarely) than a complicated large
problem that occurs less frequently. For this reason we chose not to use
SANs for our storage but
local RAID6 arrays on each
computing node." ...read
the article
Overland says cloud tech can scale NAS VTLs
Editor:-
October 14, 2010 - Overland
Storage today
announced
that it has acquired MaxiScale
- a cloud storage
technology
company.
Dr. Geoff Barrall, CTO and VP of engineering at Overland
Storage said "The logical next step for us is to create a clustered
scalable NAS forming a
local cloud of storage. When the opportunity arose to acquire MaxiScale's
well-regarded technology, we took notice. MaxiScale's architecture will provide
our customers with the ability to scale hundreds of (our)
SnapServers
into one unified pool of storage."
TwinStrata gets traction with CloudArray software
Editor:-
May 10, 2010 -TwinStrata
announced new customer deployments of its
CloudArray software - which
delivers cloud storage
functions (such as data replication,
backup/restore, data
archiving and DR) piped through an
iSCSI connection.
TwinStrata says its software supports all market-leading
hypervisors: VMware ESX/ESXi, Citrix XenServer, and Microsoft Hyper-V.
StorSimple fills "missing link" in cloud storage DNA
Editor:- May 4, 2010 - StorSimple has
exited stealth mode - announcing a bunch of collaborative customer supply
agreements - and disclosing info about its Armada storage appliance - which is
designed to reduce the cost and simplify the integration of
cloud storage within
datacenter applications and infrastructure.
Editor's comments:-
Just as application specific SSDs
are the future for the SSD
market - StorSimple's Armada system can be regarded as an application
specific SSD ASAP
which includes features such as real-time
dedupe and cloud
data encryption.
The simplest way to think about it is as "the
missing link" between the promise of cloud storage and its practicality.
The companies which have agreed to be named in StorSimple's company launch press
release (Amazon, AT&T, EMC, Iron Mountain, and Microsoft) seem to think it's
a noteworthy part of cloud storage DNA too.
Digitiliti Launches Virtual Corporate Library
Editor:-
March 22, 2010 - Digitiliti
today
announced
availability of its
DigiLIBE
a multi-functional continuous VTL,
dedupe,
compression, ediscovery appliance which automatically captures and archives
new data from the time it is created and
sanitizes it at
the end of its policy mandated life.
Pricing starts at about $20,000
for a 3TB information director and $3 per GB archived after dedupe and
compression, plus $100 per client.
New Image for Cloud Storage
Editor:- January 13, 2010
- a new article on
PCWorld.com
discusses on-low cost and no-cost cloud storage offerings from Google.
The
author David Coursey (and his commenting readers) make some interesting
comparisons with Microsoft 's SkyDrive.
Personally
I loathe the term "Cloud Storage". But I have to admit we're stuck
with it. So today I changed the graphic on the
online backup and storage
page.
The old one - with the tag about "Spellerbyte was
cooking up a new business plan which involved online web backup" - was
appropriate when it was first published 10 years ago - but no longer fits this
market's image today. I resisted the temptation to use an image compatible with
the business metaphor of "sad losers" or "big black hole for
VC investors."
Systemic Risk with "Cloud Think"
Editor:-
June 4, 2009 - Burton
Group today published an article called -
Clouds
and Systemic Risk.
The author Jack Santos
says he thinks "clouds" are at a peak hype stage and ready for a big
disillusionment phase. | |
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Spellerbyte was surfing the more
nebulous regions of the storage market. | |
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| this way to the Petabyte
SSD |
In 2016 there will be
just 3 types of
SSD in the datacenter.
One
of them doesn't exist yet - the bulk storage archive SSD.
It will
replace the last remaining strongholds of
hard drives in the
datacenter due to its unique combination of characteristics, low running costs
and operational advantages. |
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The new model of the
datacenter - how we get from here to there - and the technical problems which
will need to be solved - are just some of the ideas explored in this
visionary article. | | | |
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Looking
back at the online backup and storage market
by Zsolt Kerekes,
editor |
This market has seen
many ups and downs in the past decade. The online backup market flared most
brightly at the height of the dotcom boom crazy days in the late 1990s. That
convinced me to create a dedicated page for this subject. You can see an
archived copy of the online backup page circa 2000 -
here.
Back then - I called it "Edrives & web based storage" - because "online
backup" hadn't yet become a standard term back then.
I was
unconvinced about the business models for many of these companies - which mostly
relied on unsustainable web advertising. I'd been making my living from the
sustainable kind (of advertising) - and knew the difference.
Sure
enough - this segment of the storage market got itself a bad reputation for
vendor churn and undependability in the long term.
You can get a
flavor of how the online backup industry changed (and our web site too) in the
years which followed, by clicking these archived links:-
Now
we're recently experienced another recession (caused by the credit crunch of
2008) and you've got to ask yourself this question...
If banks can
fail - then why should you trust ANY online backup provider with your data?
The
answer is - you shouldn't. Because
history has
shown these services can disappear overnight.
But on the other hand -
there are many examples of where online backup has helped their customers
survive in the event of floods, fire etc.
A pragmatic approach - would
be to use 2 different types of offsite backup - which do not have common modes
of failure due to sharing software or geography. That's the way ahead for this
market. | | |
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