— Storage Horizons Blog —

This blog is the first in a two-part series. The second part will uncover the truths, half-truths and myths about storage.

I’ve been in the storage industry for more than 32 years with my team at XIO. Digital Equipment, Compaq, and Seagate were incredible places to learn a trade that is not something taught in any college I know of…yet.

Storage is the most interdisciplinary science there is, encompassing everything about computer architecture, of course, but, perhaps more importantly, encompassing everything mechanically-, environmentally-, fault tolerance-related (and that’s just the tip of the iceberg).

I wonder how many people really know this, let alone the real truth about storage, as opposed to all the myths and half-truths most everyone has either questioned or accepted over the past 20-plus years the industry has seen more ore less ‘open’ systems and standards such as SCSI and Fibre Channel. The focus always seems to be on the next interconnect or the next ‘feature’ to make living with storage the ‘way it is’ a little better.

Some of the myths out there are that not only are all hard drives are the same but they’re also all unreliable. Furthermore, with SSDs, the mantra is now that SSDs are more reliable than hard drives. OMG, this cannot be further from the truth on both points. More myths and half-truths include ideas such as: RAID is dead, and the cloud is something magical that will solve all CIOs’ problems associated with owning aging data centers.

I’m here to tell the ‘truths’ about storage, systems, and about the industry. Having worked inside companies that make the actual devices that go into servers or arrays, as well as having designed and built 10 generations of arrays controllers with the team at XIO (who have been with me most or all of my 32 years in the storage industry), I have a unique perspective on not only the truths, but also on how the myths and half-truths have become accepted as fact.

In future blogs, I plan to examine the truth about everything from HDDs and SSDs to service costs and system partitioning. Stay tuned; we’re just getting started!

Read more on http://stevesicola.com.

Tags: SSD, Steve Sicola