Storage: Opinions

I have a nightmare vision of storage administrators becoming clones of the mail carrier Newman from the TV sitcom Seinfeld, who once bemoaned the endless pressures of his job, crying, "The mail! It just keeps on coming and coming!"

About 20 years ago, one of my first programming assignments as a Unix systems software developer related to backup. Specifically, I was to modify the device driver for a quarter-inch cartridge tape subsystem to improve streaming performance and to enhance the associated system-level command set for ease of management.

The continuing advancement in the numbers and kinds of options available to assist with disaster recovery is encouraging growing numbers of organizations to look at ways in which to enhance their disaster recovery capabilities. Storage vendors are enhancing their replication capabilities, tools for rapid recovery for databases and core applications like Exchange are finding their way into organizations of all sizes, and, of course, virtualization has opened new disaster recovery opportunities to a wide range of organizations.

We've all experienced it: that sense of frustration whenever the disk drive LED on your laptop turns solid green for a seemingly interminable period. While enduring one such interruption recently, my thoughts turned longingly to solid state drives and their emergence as a force to be reckoned with both at the low end and high. Several recent news items underscore this fact.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again: SFF (small form factor) drives allow you to squeeze more spindles into the same rack space, giving you better performance in the same real estate. As an bonus, using 2.5-inch drives reduces the amount of electricity you use and creates less heat than using their larger cousins, essentially making your storage array less demanding on your wallet and on the electric grid.

Among the multitude of data protection challenges facing IT organizations, arguably the least favorite for IT managers is dealing with laptop systems. Each week we read more horror stories about lost notebook computers and potentially compromised data as organizations attempt to grapple with what is literally a moving target.

Every Storage Networking World conference tends to serve as a gauge on the mood of the market and provides indications of trends and directions in the storage industry, and last week's in Orlando, to me at least, reflected a storage market that is transitioning to a mature phase, where new developments are likely to be more incremental - evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

When disaster looms, who you gonna call? It could increasingly be a mathematician if IBM scientists succeed in one of their current research efforts.

Last week, while attending the Spring Storage Networking World in Orlando the big news was, believe it or not, storage networking. In this case, multiple vendors are touting Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) as storage networking's future.

It's highly likely that, if you follow the comings and goings of storage networking technology, then by now you've at least heard of the emerging Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) standard working its way through the INCITS process. To level-set, FCoE is a method of encapsulating the packets that would normally flow across a Fibre Channel storage network (SAN) for transmission over Ethernet link. Think 10 Gbps Ethernet for practical purposes. However, unlike other FC-to-Ethernet encapsulation methods like FCIP and iFCP, FCoE lives within the same OSI layer as IP, enabling enhanced performance, lossless frame transmission, and some other goodies.

The number of times that someone has declared tape "dead" probably numbers in the thousands. So it should come as no surprise that when I inquired of one tape vendor how much tape they sell annually the vendor's response was, "We sell a *&^% load of it".