Mario Apicella

Storage is bigger and faster than ever, with 1.5TB drives shipping and 8Gbps Fibre Channel, 10Gbps iSCSI, Infiniband becoming affordable. The data to fill those disks and pipes is growing faster than ever, with archiving for e-discovery and legislative requirements growing all the time, audio and video data for surveillance, teleconference archives, video blog posts, Webcasts, and simply more business processes being digitized. By contrast, a unified approach for protecting and managing that data is not really much further along than it was ten years ago, when 10TB was a large amount of data for even big enterprises.

Now that petabytes are becoming commonplace, the problem is much more urgent. If indexing software to build metadata about all the files stored across an enterprise requires a cluster of servers to run, and it still takes days to complete an index, the utility of that metadata is limited. We keep getting hints of potential solutions to this sort of problem, such as Microsoft's promise of a new file system (Windows Future Storage) based on a relational database -- originally promised as part of Windows Server 2008 but now pushed out indefinitely.

I recently reviewed Scalent's V/OE, or Virtual Operating Environment, which is software that automates the provisioning of both storage and networking for server operating system images and virtual machines. V/OE also automatically deploys images of any guest OS to a VMware partition.

The result is an essentially liquid datacenter, in which server images are completely portable. You could move a server OS from a physical machine to a virtual machine, or from one virtual machine to another, and even back to a physical machine, all without ever having to copy files or change any settings manually. Each server needs to have a lightweight agent installed, but this has minimal impact on the system.

De-duplication started out as a way to do backups without having to store mostly the same stuff over and over again. Companies like Data Domain, Diligent Technologies, and NetApp provided de-dupe of virtual tape libraries and direct-to-disk backup targets, providing full backups that stored only the changes since the previous backup. The result: You could reap the same space savings you get with incremental backups but without the necessity for multiple restores to re-create an entire volume.

Now these same companies are advertising de-duplication of near-line storage, and even online storage in NetApp’s case, while other vendors are using de-duplication to reduce WAN traffic, shrink the size of databases, or compress e-mail archives. Yes, de-duping is going gangbusters. Heck, we might even dream of the day when you might never need more than one copy of any file throughout the entire enterprise. Assuming it’s possible, is that something you’d want?

We don't have Olympic Games for file server systems but the SPEC SFS (System File Server) benchmark serves as the next best thing, providing a comparable rank of file server performance. If you sifted through all of the SPEC SFS results published to the SPEC Web site, you'd find that the fastest NAS systems are from NetApp, BlueArc, and EMC, who take what in Beijing would have been a gold, a silver, and a bronze medal, in that order.

Like Olympic records, SPEC results tend to change over time. In fact the current top 10 list, which reflects results as of June 18, 2008, looks quite different from a SPEC SFS results snapshot I took about two years ago.

Traditionally, network transport has run on two separate technologies, FC (Fibre Channel) and Ethernet, which, like two railroads with different gauges, seemed bound to never meet.

Just about everybody agrees that having a unified network could bring significant financial and administrative benefits, but when exploring possible simplifications to the datacenter fabric, customers faced discouraging and costly options such as tearing down their FC investments or extending the FC network to reach every server and every application.

As the old saying goes, "When you're holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail." For me, this means more than just seeing a storage angle everywhere I look. Lately, it also means seeing the environmental impact of every product I review.

Both hammers -- storage and green tech -- saw a worthwhile nail in the PowerEdge T300, an entry-level server recently launched by Dell.