Storage in 2008

Here is a set of predictions for the year 2008

1. Green Storage
There will be more activities to make the storage green. There will be new    technologies and strategies proposed. This will become center of attraction in late  2008

2. Data Management
Data grows exponentially. So there will be techniques to handle the explosion. More
companies will work on managing data like meta data management, Single instance,
compression, increasing the data density, etc.

3. Storage Management
More storage products will support SMI-S. Specification may get additions in
security and diagnostics.

4. FCoE Products may be marketed in late 2008

5. 8Gb Products also enter in to the market in late 2008

6. Object Storage Device
There will be much interesting works and talks that go around OSD.

I wish you all Happy New Year.

Networked Storage using DAS

Disks on your Servers (DAS) can be utilized to form a pool of networked storage. RevStor and Seanodes Inc are offering a software application to achieve this.

SANware from RevStor has the intelligence to identify the CPU and memory capabilities of the nodes and it will not use a device that can get disconnected from network.

SANware banks on the Agents installed on the servers which can take part in networked storage pool. The data is sliced and encrypted before it is transferred into the network. The software also supports deduplication to check the data explosion.

Open-E GMBH, a German company that has been around for a while, also has a new software application to let users create storage area networks (SAN) out of DAS using memory sticks.

Live Data Migration

A major VMware Infrastructure 3 update was made available on December 11. This update contains a software piece which does the live data migration from one storage array to another.

VMware Storage VMotion performs Live Data Migration. Storage VMotion enables the live migration of running virtual machines. In the latest update of VMware, VMotion got upgraded with the feature of live data migration. To learn more about VMotion, visit the following link.

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vmotion_datasheet.pdf

 This upgrade really helps data center managers when they

1. want to move data from one storage array to another
2. want to upgrade the under provisioned volume
3. want to upgrade / switch to a new vendor

Here goes the press release from VMware.

Dell has a demo on VMotion. To view the demo, visit,

Gartner predicts that there will be 3 million virtual machines in place by 2009 while currently the count of virtual machines is of 500,000.

To add fuel, Microsoft released the beta version of its virtualization software (Hyper-V hypervisor formerly known as Viridian) ahead of the schedule.

Honeycomb

Honeycomb is a Fixed Content Archiving tool from Sun Microsystems. Project Honeycomb was started all the way back in late 2002. Sun Microsystems conducted over sixty customer interviews, recorded hundreds of pages of customer input, and invented new approaches to data integrity, high availability, protocols that scale efficiently, load balancing, and self-healing systems. Over fifteen patents were filed on their object placement algorithms, autonomous cluster management and low cost load balancing.

Honeycomb is designed for ultra-low cost, high availability, simple to install and manage and grow over time. Honeycomb uses advanced clustering techniques to build large systems from inexpensive components. The software stack is layered on Solaris and is being open-sourced, meaning zero license fees. It contains extensive metadata creation and analysis features to aid searching. Applications can be written to use the software stack’s capabilities through an openly available API.

Future applications will likely include features like data encryption, de-duplication, compression and XAM. Sun supports the XAM metadata standard.

Pricing for the Sun StorageTek 5800 is $245,000 for a 16-node, 32TB configuration. An eight-node configuration is also available.

Just to know the competing products; EMC makes the Centera file system, Hewlett-Packard Co makes StorageWorks RISS (Reference Information Storage System) and IBM’s brand is called SAN File System storage software.