Tuesday 2 January 2007

Storage Resolutions

The new year is here. Everyone loves to make resolutions to say how they are going to improve their lives. Personally I think it is nonsense; if you want to change, then you can do it any time rather than the abitrary time of new year.

Anyway, enough of my humbug. Here's a few storage resolutions I hope to maintain:


  • iSCSI - I haven't paid enough attention to this. I think iSCSI is due to hit its tipping point this year and get much more widespread adoption.
  • WAFS - Wide Area File Systems interest me. Any opportunity to reduce the volume of data being moved across networks while centralising the gold copy strikes me as a sensible idea.
  • CDP - There are some interesting products around providing continuous data protection. They aren't scalable yet, but when they are I can see them being big.
  • NAS Virtualisation - OK, I know how it works and what the products are; I just need to get into more detail.
  • CAS - I've always seen CAS as pointless. It's time to give it a second chance.

So that's the technology side covered. What about process?

  • ILM - I think it is time to harp on about proper ILM - i.e. that which is integrated into the application rather than the poor efforts we've seen to date. I think application development needs to be addressed to cover this.
  • SRM - how about some proper tools which actually do the job of managing the (large scale) process of storage deployment? More thought required here.
  • Cost Management - I believe there are lots of options for managing and reducing cost, I should expound on them more.
  • Technology Refresh - Always a problem and certainly needs more thought for mature datacentres.

Hmm, funny how each year's resolutions end up sounding just like the ones the year before?

1 comment:

Administrator said...

Chris,

I agree about the ISCSI. From conversations Ive had with friends and ex-colleagues it sounds like a lot of people are looking into and implementing ISCSI and the best part of it is........ there appears to be a huge ISCSI skills shortage.

Personally Ive never been too interested in WAFS. MAy be I need to give it a closer look this year.

The only problem is, there doesn't seem to be enough time to look into everything I would like to. So WAFS might get passed over again this year from me.