Data Storage Leaders Introduce New Wares

louismg writes "Data storage giant EMC announced upgrades to their storage hardware family this morning, and claimed performance increases of 25% to 100%, with increased capacity and disk speeds. This comes two weeks after competitor BlueArc announced Titan, the world's biggest ever NAS box, which claims throughput of 5 Gbps and 256 terabytes in a single hardware file system. How much is enough, and as IT administrators, what is the answer to today's issues - improved hardware, or software?"

Comments

Seagate, too!

[morcheeba]

Also today, Seagate launched a family of server-class 2.5" drives sporting 10k rpm and an Ultra320 SCSI or Fibre Channel interface. No details on Seagate's web site yet, though.

Improved backups..

[Sri Ramkrishna]

What they need is improved backups. I don't give a fig about space if I can't back it up. So maybe someone should be looking at how we're supposed to be backing this stuff or archive this stuff. Or are we supposed to keep a warehouse of EMCs around? I can lay a bit that we are going to need serious backup infrastructure than what we have today to keep up.

sri

Re:I have some predictions too...

[zuzulo]

Adding the dimension of time to data storage as in the link you provide is hardly revolutionary (cf cvs and other version control systems). On the other hand, there are some very interesting developments in distributed file and archival systems.

Some of this work is happening in the academic community (OceanStore, et al) and some is happening in the commercial sector (Avamar, Connected, etc etc).

It seems to me that the storage industry is advancing on two main fronts.

First, hardware is getting better and better at a fairly rapid rate. Storage densities, I/O speeds, hardware based data protection are all improving. This area is generally characterized by incremental improvements like you discuss and is where established players like EMC and other hardware players dominate.

Second, the community is in the process of developing software that attempts to handle (index, search, backup, restore, distribute, etc) the exponential growth in amount of data stored.

The difficult problem between the two is the algorithmic one at this time. This is where revolutionary approaches are needed. And, in fact, there are quite a few folks working in this area. More interesting, perhaps, is the number of efforts that have tried and failed to make significant headway.

I agree that there are likely to be revolutionary changes in the software that we use to interact with data, and sooner rather than later.