— Storage Horizons Blog —

This blog is the second in a two-part series.

First, let’s start with what storage is about. The fundamentals of storage are about:

• Performance to the application in the way of I/O and BW;
• System and component reliability;
• System availability; and
• Data protection/integrity.

Storage is also about data management, which has come to be known as ‘thick storage controller features’ or the ‘application/OS controlled features’. These features are manifested in controllers with lots of JBOD shelves of drives or software in servers attaching to dumb or intelligent storage that provides some subset of the fundamentals of storage.

The storage industry has focused over the past 20-plus years on data management within storage controllers – essentially since the late 80s, when Windows and Linux started becoming the low-cost replacement for ‘proprietary solutions’ The problem is that those proprietary solutions from the likes of companies such as IBM, DEC, Amdahl and Unisys actually provided all the data managed within these ‘hardware and software solutions’. In other words, these solutions were basically doing what has been done at Google and Facebook with ‘no RAID’ and zillions of SATA drives!

The problem with this focus on features from the storage vendors is that all the fundamentals have been pushed aside, which means that performance is not really a focus, reliability can drive service revenue, availability can do the same, and data integrity is ‘good enough’. SSDs are now the big ‘buzz’ and seen as the panacea of all ills, which they are not. They are an evolution of the storage device, while HDDs still command the lion’s share of the shipments around the world.

XIO is all about storage fundamentals, blowing past all the myths and half-truths to get what customers want: storage that performs, is always there, and is never lost. XIO is also about the new world of ‘applications/OS’ features that will replace every single feature within array controllers. Over the next few months, I’ll be writing and debunking every myth and half truth this industry has put forth, and also what customers can do about it. I’ll also be uncovering why this is so important, given the scale of storage growth and the emergence of the cloud, so that a cloud-based solution will actually be worth something rather than just the hype it seems to be generating today.

Read more on http://stevesicola.com.

Tags: data management, SSD, Steve Sicola, storage performance