Storage Predictions for 2009

It's the end of another year and of course time to the obligatory posts on predictions in the industry for the next 12 months. True to form, I've spent some time thinking and here are my top 5 ruminations for the coming year.

• EMC join SPC. EMC will finally have the epiphany we've all been dreaming of and embrace the world of generalised benchmarking. DMX will prove to be underpowered (due to the lack of SATA drives and the discovery that SSD is in fact the slowest disk technology) and be outperformed by Tony Asaro and his new Drobo appliance.
• HDS Win At Web Awards. HDS embrace new media in a game changing way and Hu wins first prize at the Weblog Awards. Barry Burke is so impressed, he defects to HDS from EMC, becoming www.thestoragedefeatist.com.
• XIV Conquers the World. IBM releases XIV-1000, by sending Moshe Yanai back in time from 2032, the time when Atmos became self-aware and took over storage for the entire world. EMC counter, sending StorageZilla (now aged 32) back to defeat Moshe in a monumental battle pitting SATA against SSD.
• JWT joins Star Trek. Jon Toigo bows out of storage to follow a career in acting. His first role as the father of Willam Riker in Star Trek XI is critically acclaimed as a work of genius.
• Convoy II: SWCSA is Released. The life of Marc Farley is brought to the big screen as he attempts to outwit the authorities and drive from the west to east coast using nothing but his blogging skills. Farley is portrayed on screen by Kris Kristofferson, reprising his role from the original cult movie.

Check back next year to see how many of these predictions did in fact come true.

Betamax

In case you don't always go back and look at comments (and let's face it, it's not easy to track them), then have a look at Tony's comment from my post yesterday. It's good to see a bit of banter going on and that's what HDS could do with.

HDS have hardly developed a good blogging prowess, it's more a case of "oh well, better do that" than taking a lead in new media.

Look at EMC.

There's geeky leaky Storagezilla with his uber-technical posts and sneaky advance notice of EMC technology.

Next The Storage Anarchist with his ascerbic character and product assassinations of the competition.

And who can forget Chuck, EMC's futurologist with his head in the cloud.

There's others of course, filling in the technical detail. Apologies if I haven't mentioned you by name. EMC have certainly grabbed Web 2.0 and given it a good shake.

Sadly HDS don't seem to have the same enthusiasm for marketing to their customers. Blog posts are few and far between from the small slew of bloggers they have to date. Content is shallow and that's a big problem.

We *all* know USP is faster than DMX. Anyone who's had the products in their lab know exactly what I'm talking about. Unfortunately unless HDS make a song and dance about it, they're going to be the Betamax of the Enterprise storage world.

Tony, keep the posts coming! Give is some real substance to beat up the competition with!!

2 Days, 2 Bod Posts

For the second time in two days I find myself drawn to comment on a Storagebod related post.

The subject today is Tony Asaro's rant on one of StorageBod's recent posts denegrating virtualisation.

Now let's get things clear - I like HDS's implementation of virtualisation. I've deployed it, I'd recommend it again, but some of Tony's comments are way off base.

"The cost per GB for your DMX FATA and SATA drives is much higher than using other tiered storage solutions." - yes, but UVM ain't free - there's a licence charge. When you virtualise an array, you're not paying for just JBOD, you're paying for extra stuff like the controllers. Also on the USP array you have to reserve out ports for virtualisation; if you connect the storage together through a fabric then you'll be taking up fabric ports too. The point is, the cost of HDS virtualisation means there's a break even point in the TBs of storage - from my experience, that was a big number.

"Storagebod does not want to have applications span multiple storage systems but other IT professionals are open to doing this. And storage virtualization is a powerful technology to enable this. That is the point of any virtualization technology - to overcome the physical limitations of IT infrastructure." - there are very good reasons for not spanning arrays with applications, like ensuring replicated storage is consistent, for instance. Whilst virtualisation allows a virtual array to grow in size to almost limitless amounts (247PB in USP V) it also means there's a concentration of risk; multiple components to fail, multiple places where data can be pinned in cache when things go wrong. In fact, placing data on lower availability arrays will increase risk.

"That may be true for Storagebod but that is not my experience in most data centers. We are shifting from transactional data being the “big space-hogs” to unstructured data consuming the lion’s share." - this may be true, but USP LUN-based virtualisation isn't going to help here. Overlaying file-level granularity data migration onto LUN-based arrays would require a particularly complicated scheme for ensuring data for migration was concentrated onto exactly the right LUNs so they could be moved to another tier. Anyway, why put unstructured data on expensive enterprise arrays?

I think we all expected Tony would have something better to talk about than technology HDS brought to the market 4+ years ago. We need to hear something new, something game-changing (oh and not me-too stuff like HDS putting SSDs into their arrays).

Tomorrow I *promise* I'll talk about something else.