The enterprise storage business is exhibiting increased diversity driven by the explosion in data and rising energy costs. This is most evident and obvious with the advent of higher capacity SATA devices in the enterprise to support archiving, compliance and growing tier 2 and tier 3 applications. But other innovations are coming to the forefront of storage design as well, including the resurgence of solid state disks, technologies that spin down devices that are not in use (e.g. MAID) and virtual tape configurations that actually include tape. Virtualization technologies at the file and block level, including thin provisioning are becoming more popular and clustered storage (e.g. Google File System) is gaining attention of buyers and sellers alike.
It is becoming clear that while the design of storage systems increasingly includes these hybrid technologies, the focus of innovation remains in software to exploit hardware to both reduce costs and lower energy consumption. Tiered storage remains one of the most compelling and promising approaches to solving these problems and all major enterprise storage suppliers must be able to articulate a compelling tiered storage strategy, ideally without having to wait for a complete ILM vision to materialize. Suppliers will take a variety of approaches to tiered storage (with varying degrees of classification and automated data movement), and should start out with simple steps that can include:
- In-box tiering; an approach EMC is aggressively driving bringing high capacity devices into existing architectures like DMX;
- Virtualization engines that allocate diverse assets to different tiers (e.g. EMC Invista, Hitachi USPVM and IBM SVC);
- Simplified automated tiering within an architecture (e.g. Compellent);
- Over time, more advanced automation that includes anticipatory staging of data and device spin down where possible.
The challenge for vendors is finding the right mix. For example, while approaches like wide striping are popular in accounts that do thin provisioning, the very fact that data is so spread out makes spindown more difficult, because all devices contain critical data. Clustered storage brings similar challenges where spreading data everywhere and being able to rapidly recover from failure may be counterpoised to reducing energy costs using techniques like intelligent spin down.
One wild card in this diversity equation remains cooling and specifically liquid cooling. As Fred Moore has said: "Air moves heat; chilled water re-moves heat." This is potentially a niche area in storage that will grow in importance and might even provide leverage into the data center for new entrants.
Action Item: Storage vendors are faced with a wide variety of technology innovations that in combination can solve real problems for users. As packaging advancements increasingly accommodate lots of different components, suppliers should focus efforts not on the devices themselves but the software to automate data placement and optimize costs, including energy expenses. Cooling, especially liquid cooling remains a variable and is a potential threat and opportunity for existing players and upstarts alike.
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