Nibble:- Rackmount Storage - from Obscurity to Popularity

Rackmount storage is one of the most popular and fastest growing segments in the storage industry today, but it was not always so.

Rackmount computer systems started to appear in the mid 1970's powered by the 8 bit microprocessor revolution which was quietly reshaping the computer landscape. My first job in 1977 was building a real-time training simulator which used a proprietary rackmount computer from a long forgotten (Signetics) processor. In the mark 2 version we improved things by putting in a 2nd (Intel) processor. There were no operating systems in those days. To get the real usable speed out of 8 bit micros, you wrote everything in assembler and changed tasks by interrupts. By the late 1970's you could get "standard" rackmount computers from Intel using Multibus, and a real operating system called RMX.

In the 1980's VMEbus became the new standard for high performance rackmount systems, in which you could get every type of processor upto and including SPARC and SunOS. The high end systems I worked on for military and other research applications typically had multiple processors running different operating systems in the same backplane, which for a techie - was great fun. For low end systems the company I worked for sold rackmount PCs with passive backplanes from companies like Qualogy. Industrial PCs became popular because they replaced proprietary computers running SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) which oversaw networks of programmable controllers in car factories, bottling plants and wire manufacture. SCADA was also used to control process controllers in industries like chemicals, oil and brewing.

But outside the industrial, communications, or military markets or a computer R&D environment the average user was unlikely to encounter a rackmount computer in an "hands on" way right upto the mid 1990s. Then the internet, and particularly the web changed everything.

As editor of the Sun Microsystems buyers guide, called the SPARC Product Directory, I noted that rackmount SPARC servers had moved from relative obscurity to the #1 most popular product slot visited by readers in 1999. That's because it was more economic to implement ecommerce transactions using server farms built from networked rackmount systems than using single monolithic Sun mainframes which cost several times more.

The same phenomenom was happening in the Wintel world. Research company IDC reported that throughout the US IT recession in 2000 and 2001, shipments of rack optimised servers continued high double digit growth rates. This was also commented on in Dell's own financial reports. It wasn't long before storage vendors started noticing that their rackmount tape drives, RAID systems etc were growing at a much faster rate than anything else they were selling.

I expect that rackmount servers and storage will become the dominant form factor for enterprise installations. Rackmount takes up less floor space. It's physically more secure than isolated boxes, and it's cheaper to maintain. In fact on this web site, STORAGEsearch.com, most of the systems images featured in ads and in news stories have been rackmount for the last couple of years.

The products featured on this page are only a small proportion of the thousands of rackmount products from hundreds of manufacturers that you can find on this site. Rackmount Storage is the way of the present and the form factor of the future.