Entries categorized under “Networked Storage”

A frequently reiterated statistic is the high percentage of infrequently accessed or static data that resides on production storage systems - up to 80% according to some estimates. In fact, a recent joint study conducted over 3 months by researchers from NetApp and the University of California and presented at USENIX 2008 found that over 90% of the 22 TB of data stored on two enterprise file servers was rarely accessed after it was stored. Specifically, 66% of the files were re-opened only once and 95% were re-opened fewer than five times. (read more)

WORM (Write Once Read Many) technology is often viewed by users as a ubiquitous technology. Though WORM is available on many types of storage systems today (whether they use disk, tape or optical), a company may fail to fully recognize or comprehend that about the only aspect of WORM that these storage system vendors agree upon is the words that comprise the acronym WORM. Beyond that, how WORM is implemented and managed long term on each storage system can vary significantly. (read more)

Having once worked at a Fortune 500 company and watched it live the consolidation dream, I knew the reality was not necessarily the dreamy experience that vendors so earnestly promised. Yes, my company reduced its storage footprint, realized a return on investment (ROI), improved storage utilization and increased system availability - all critical components for it to justify a storage consolidation initiative. However my company only began to see some of the hidden intangible costs of consolidation once the process was under way. (read more)

Right now commercial data stores are on track to achieve the petascale range sooner rather than later. According to multiple sources, data collected and stored is doubling every year for most businesses; a rate of growth that has held fairly constant over time. In the 1990s, a 100 GB database was large enough to stress most systems - back when disk scanning speeds were 30 MB/s and database tools were relatively immature. In the current decade, terascale data stores are already common - and managing 100 GB is now considered somewhat trivial. In the coming decade, truly massive petascale systems can be expected to dwarf today's large multi-terabyte stores - requiring a similar leap in the technology being used to store and retrieve the data. (read more)

I was first briefed on the NEC D-Series about a year ago and was, at that time, impressed by its breadth of functions and scalability. However it then promptly and curiously disappeared from view (as has happened before with other computing products offered by NEC) such that I largely forgot about the D-Series product line. Then last week the D-Series re-appears out of the blue in conjunction with the announcement of an OEM relationship with RAID Inc. In my mind, this did not make sense. Why does someone like RAID Inc. take a chance with a relatively unknown product in the US storage market when it can partner with any number of existing and established storage system providers? (read more)

One would think that at some point organizations would reach the tipping point for storage consumption and that year-over-year storage capacity growth rates of 30%, 50%, 100% or more would come to an end, or at least slow down. If so, it hasn't occurred yet and, if anything, it shows every sign of continuing for the foreseeable future. Nowhere is this more evident than with the amount of data that companies need to archive and retain. (read more)

The Computerworld column I wrote a few weeks ago on the topic of "A Bit of a Flaw with SATA disk drives" sparked quite a bit of debate around just how safe is data on today's RAID-based storage systems that use SATA disk drives? A series of comments appeared on Computerworld's site where the column appeared as well as on a forum at Nabble's web site. Also, at least one storage system vendor felt obligated to send me their white paper that explains how its RAID-based storage system accounts for this bit error rate problem on SATA disk drives. (read more)

In this blog entry I will discuss the need for proper labeling of cables, servers, and storage hardware. I have been in many data centers over time and have seen extremes from no labeling to everything being labeled. What I will try to assist you with in this blog entry is find a happy medium between the two. Cable Labeling - The importance here is to ensure that each end of the cable is labeled, as well as any junction box interconnects that may exist for the same portion of glass or copper. This will ensure that when there is a physical plant problem of some kind, it will make it extremely easy for you to locate and run down the issue. (read more)

As far as cable management goes there are many schools of thought around this subject, and I will provide you with the ammunition you need to deploy an efficient cable plant, which will go a long way in supporting your environment well into the future. The thing I find interesting is almost none of the storage vendors (Server, Disk, or Switch) provide any real detail around this subject, potentially because everyone's data centers are different. (read more)

I believe a new way on thinking should be applied to the deployment on Infiniband technology in the storage landscape. Most of you probably think of Infiniband as predominately a backend transport for storage, and/or the interconnection mechanism for high compute clusters (HPC). Or, "Oh yeah, I heard something about that 5-6 years ago, isn't that only used in super-computing or giant research labs?" (read more)

"You know things are tough when companies finally stop throwing capacity at their infrastructure problems and start thinking about how they provision and allocate storage." Those are the sentiments that Craig Nunes, 3PAR's VP of Marketing, expressed in a recent conversation I had with him in regards to how the economy is affecting 3PAR's business. In short, the economy is not affecting 3PAR badly at all. (read more)

It's 2008 and one would think that disk-based storage systems are beyond the point of catastrophic outages and/or data loss as a result of disk drive failures. The prevalent use of RAID in storage systems for disk drive protection in its many forms would seem like ample insurance against the loss of data. However a careful examination of the facts exposes the flaws in assuming that RAID alone is sufficient as a means of data protection; especially when used in conjunction with today's high capacity SATA disk drives. (read more)

However as companies move towards archiving data on disk-based storage systems, you can't just always build bigger buildings or knock down walls. If anything, companies want to store more data in a smaller footprint. Making it more complicated, companies are creating exponentially more data than they were 10, 5 and even 2 years ago and keeping it for longer periods of time. Factor in mobile devices that manipulate existing data and create new data and the increasing use of video in corporations and the result is millions, billions and even trillions of file-based data elements that create thousands of terabytes of data. (read more)

One can hardly have a conversation about storage management these days without the topic of archiving surfacing. Part of the reason that archiving is commanding more attention is because as companies create and keep ever greater amounts of referential data on their production storage systems, it is creating a host of new problems (read more)