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Big (and Small) Developments In Storage
louismg writes "On the same day that BlueArc released the Titan 2000 family, with performance more than three times higher than rivals EMC and NetApp, including a global namespace and scalability to 512 terabytes, EMC took a low-end approach by unveiling a line for the SMB market, dubbed Insignia. Red Herring claims that BlueArc's announcement changes the storage game, while The Register says that small means beautiful. What makes sense for today's IT infrastructures, with data growth showing no sign of slowing?"
The Titan 2000 gives customers the option of consolidating multiple applications with various requirements on the same system and allows a single storage pool of 512 terabytes in capacity.
:)
thats alot of pRon
The Insignia line consists of a basic, low-cost version of the VisualSRM management package, an SMB edition of the eRoom collaboration software, an SMB edition of the RepliStor replication package, and an SMB edition of Storage Administrator for Exchange.
How can we get more from our customers who already shelled out top dollar for our storage? With a variety of cleverly-named software packages, of course. Ugh, I *despise* EMC.
As both SAN and NAS envrionments will proliferate both in density, and diversity. I forsee that, as these become more and more commonplace, we will have at least one locally attached to each computing device in the near future - giving birth to LA-SAN/NAS.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
More bulk storage only solves half the problem. As the volume of email and document archives grows, organizing and searching them becomes more interesting than just storing them.
Personally, I'm facing a minor storage crisis with a 15-gig music tree, a 20-gig photos tree, and dozens of gigs of other useful stuff that I only need on an occasional basis.
When I offload the camera, the files go to the laptop. To avoid duplicating files, the most recent few weeks worth of photos should always be on the laptop. But anything older should move off, to free up space on the drive. I'd like to keep as much of my music in both places as possible, but I need a way to replicate file moves, metadata changes, and deletions so the same bad rips and inaccurate tags don't persist after I fix them once.
There are a set of notes files, mileage logs, and other small files which I'd like to synchronize between the desktop and laptop. However, there's a possibility of both copies changing simultaneously (or at least between syncs), so I'd need a way to reconcile changes.
These little dilemmas have me wasting a lot of space until I resolve them. Stale data and useless files are all over the place, and I don't have the notes I need when I need them. It sounds like I might be able to do most of this with rsync, but the notes files, CVS maybe?
Has anyone tackled these issues before in a useful way, perhaps a sensible-storage-organization HOWTO? More space is not the issue right now, I need more sense.
HP have had products like the MSA20 for some time that compete directly with and are industry tested.
As slow as it can be, it seems you want something like iDisk so that you can have anything you want available to you anywhere. I think the issue is at the presentation layer rather than the storage layer, although I wonder what it would take to have roving volumes on a distributed SAN...
Look,whether you use a NetApp and are limited to say 192Tb or a Titan at 512Tb is not importatnt for MOST installations. The huge issues is, as it always has been and always will be, BACKUP -- or more properly backup and the retention policy that drives the back up scheme. Half a petabyte of spinning disk doesn't mean much without some data protection.
Sounds perfectly on-topic to me... I'm reading some of the documents now and it seems like they're working on solving exactly my problem. It'll take some more research about the group to be sure, but so far I like what these folks are up to. I just hope the downmodder gets metamoderated into extinction...
I wrote a script on my computers to facilitate the transfer of data from remote sources to local trees. Basically, the script accesses a specific directory common to all my media, and moves the data to a timestamp directory somewhere in my homedirectory. I originally wrote it to make working with flash drives easier, as I was frequently downloading stuff at work to use at home.
/transfer directory on a CDROM or flash drive, and all the data in it would be moved to $HOME/transfer/$timestamp whenever I ran the script.
I'd have a
Why is this relevant? About a year ago, I expanded the script to access $HOME/transfer on my laptop through scp. My only grip was that the throughput was low...ssh encryption makes my laptop CPU a significant bottleneck. If I need to use the script again, I'll probably rewrite it to use rsync.
If you run Windows on your laptop, you can modify the concept to use a mounted SMB filesystem. All that remains is a script on the laptop to examine the timestamps of all your data and remove anything that's too old.
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"What makes sense for today's IT infrastructures, with data growth showing no sign of slowing?"
Both really. Alright, it's really cool that they can now store up to 512 terabytes. But for many businesses, that storage capacity isn't needed - and won't be for a while. By the time they do need it, they'd be at the point of needing to replace the old system anyways.