Storage: Opinions

For years companies have been deploying Massive Arrays of Idle Disks technologies to reduce data-storage energy costs. The on/off or spin/no spin approaches reduce energy consumption by putting power-hungry disk drives to sleep when they are not being used.

Mother Nature has wrought havoc in the Gulf and many of us were once again faced personally with worries over friends and family in harm's way and professionally with concerns about organizations facing uncertainty over their ability to continue or even recover their businesses. In a timely coincidence, I happened to be attending a disaster recovery (DR) conference on the west coast, and, appropriately, Hurricane Ike occupied center stage for much of the discussion. A number of would-be participants never made it to the conference as they were attending to more pressing matters back home.

In August Symantec released the results of its 2008 IT Disaster Recovery survey, reporting global business trends around disaster recovery planning (DR) and preparedness. Perhaps the most compelling (and certainly the most reported) finding in the report was the apparent decline in C-level executive involvement in DR planning.

In our daily lives we try to protect ourselves from the worst. We buy insurance for our cars, homes and health and we safeguard personal information. Shouldn't business owners and IT managers treat their networks and critical infrastructure the same way?

Evidence is mounting of a growing cynicism regarding green initiatives within the IT infrastructure space. We may be reaching a point where vendor hype has hit a saturation point and beginning to meet with customer resistance. While there is a genuine concern about data center power consumption, particularly with regard to accommodating increasingly dense technology footprints, the larger concern for most, particularly in the current climate, is controlling costs.

In a recent review, I consolidated FC and Ethernet networks using FCoE (fibre channel over Ethernet) and Cisco's new Nexus 5000 switch. As the review showed, the combination merged the two transport protocols easily, allowing FC frames to channel through a 10G connection without giving up features or performance.

Of the assortment of technologies swarming around the storage and data protection space these days, one that can be counted on to garner both lots of interest and lots of questions among users is deduplication. The interest is understandable since the potential value proposition, in terms of reduction of required storage capacity, is at least conceptually on a par with the ROI of server virtualization. The win-win proposition of providing better services (e.g. disk-based recovery) while reducing costs is undeniably attractive.

Healthy debate is often necessary to get a balanced view of an emerging technology. Somewhere between endorsements and detractions, a realistic understanding of the long-term outlook for a technology arrives. As such, I have decided to turn to a guest once again for the second installment in what I hope to be an ongoing debate over the merits of flash SSDs (solid-state drives).

Being an optimist, I like to think that storage management is or will be getting better. It's hard, however, to ignore the fact that many admins don't know much about what's going on in the storage boxes they are sitting on. And it's not their fault, as management has been the Cinderella of storage apps for many years, and she hasn't found a prince to rescue her quite yet.

Everyone always worries about backup, backup, backup. Guess what? None of your users, or managers for that matter, care one bit about backup. All they want is restore, and they want it immediately. So shift your focus from backup to restore.

Would you pay several times more for a technology that yields only dubious performance advantage? How about if that technology is experiencing a high rate of product returns from early adopters?