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StorageMojo

Data storage info & analysis


Economic crisis and the storage industryYesterday

Yes, Virginia, the storage industry will survive the crisis
Economists and business leaders generally agree that the current, as yet unofficial, recession will be the worst we have seen since the Great Depression. The credit bubble has popped and we are facing global de-leveraging that will take years to unwind.

De-leveraging is fancy term for “a lot less money rolling around.” The computer industry started after the Great Depression so this will be the worst times we’ve ever seen.

How bad will it get for storage?
Storage is a special case. Disk drives underlie everything we do and they show no sign of slowing their capacity increases and price drops.

Data growth rates are a little less certain - contracting businesses produce less data - but the economic advantages of online data continue to grow as cost per gigabyte drops. Even in the financial sector someone is going to have to unravel all of those credit derivative swaps and synthetic securities that the “rocket scientists” - heckuva job, guys! - developed.

Where will this impact IT operations? Right in the heart of the array business.

A little smarter, a lot cheaper
Assume 80% of all business data is unstructured. And suppose 80% of that data is stored on storage arrays that are optimized for transactional data.

If RAID arrays average $6/GB today and cluster storage averages $2/GB we can begin to estimate the potential impact. In a perfect world 64%




Atmos: EMC rolls the diceNovember 17

EMC’s Atmos, the product formerly known as Hulk/Maui, has gotten the full EMC marketing machine treatment. With a twist: EMC is rolling the dice on an unproven concept.

If it’s eat lunch or be lunch, EMC prefers to dine. I like it.

The pig
I covered Atmos’ academic antecedents - OceanStore and Antiquity - in an earlier post. After looking at the announcement material it is clear that Atmos offers far less than the Berkeley folks envisioned.

They may want to get there, but they aren’t there yet. That’s why we have v1 software.

Squinting past the hype
There are some oddities in the announcement.

  • No customer endorsement. Normal EMC announcements always have joyful customers endorsing the product. For a product that has been shipping since June - according to some EMC bloggers - that Atmos doesn’t is unusual.
  • “Powerful object metadata and policy-based information management capabilities . . . .” Atmos is not a file system - file systems exist on the client - so the lack of OceanStore’s introspective data management feature is ugly.
  • How do you access it? Most attention has focused on REST and SOAP. It does support CIFS, NFS and IFS (Installable File System - haven’t seen that in a while). The latter are more important.
  • Centera vs Atmos. EMC is at great pains to claim that Atmos doesn’t compete with Centera. Obviously it does, since it would be trivial to add the Centera’s


The computer science behind EMC’s cloud storageNovember 12

EMC has announced Hulk/Maui, now known as Atmos. I’m flying to Boston today and don’t have access to EMC’s announcement documents.

But I have something better: the papers that provide the theoretical underpinning for Atmos. They provide an in-depth background that isn’t often available for new products.

These papers have too many interesting details to summarize them all. Here are some points that strike my fancy. YMMV.

If you want to understand Atmos these papers are essential. Details of EMC’s implementation will differ of course, but the underlying architectural trade-offs and management issues remain.

A 10 trillion file store
In 2000 a UC Berkeley paper OceanStore: An Architecture for Global-Scale Persistent Storage, authored by John Kubiatowicz, David Bindel, Yan Chen, Steven Czerwinski, Patrick Eaton, Dennis Geels, Ramakrishna Gummadi, Sean Rhea, Hakim Weatherspoon, Westley Weimer, Chris Wells, and Ben Zhao, laid out the architecture of what is now Atmos. EMC provided funding for the research and Patrick Eaton went to work for EMC a couple of years ago.

The abstract says:

OceanStore is a utility infrastructure designed to span the globe and provide continuous access to persistent information. Since this infrastructure is comprised of untrusted servers, data is protected through redundancy and cryptographic techniques. To impro


How bad do the ads suck?November 10

I’ve been working with IDG to monetize StorageMojo through ad sales without much success. The latest iteration of the process you may have noticed: the ad that covers the page until you click “close.” They pay OK, but they aren’t the difference between hamburger and steak.

Which, BTW, you are welcome to do as soon as you like. Please don’t suffer through them on my account.

I think I was told that the ad would only appear like once a week per viewer, but I don’t know if that is correct or true.

Anyway, I invite StorageMojo readers to comment. What are the right limits for ads on StorageMojo?

Are the “roadblock” ads - I think that is what these coverall ads are called - too much? How much advertising is OK?

The StorageMojo take
I make no apologies for being a capitalist tool. But I also don’t want to drive off readers either. So let me know what you think.

If anyone has a line on a low-overhead ad network that pays reasonably well for a high-quality audience, I’d love to hear about it.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. Especially on this topic. Wes, thanks for the tickler and yes, I think I know where you are.

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Flash-talking with Fusion-ioNovember 7

Fusion-io commissioned me to create a video with David Flynn, Fusion-io co-founder and CTO, talking about their architecture and the benefits of high bandwidth NAND flash. Even though I’ve been researching flash for a couple of years, some of David’s comments surprised me.

Flash doesn’t make a good disk
Anyone who cares to can track how my view of flash has evolved. From early enthusiasm, based on my happy experience with a flash-based HP Omnibook 300 - the original netbook - in the ’90s, to increasing skepticism.

The “aha” moment came at the Flash Memory Summit in August, when an industry panel agreed that

. . . NAND flash is best seen as an extension to DRAM and a layer between DRAM and disk - not as the guts of a disk drive replacement.

BTW, I started skeptical on Fusion-io and have become a convert. Go figure.

The learning continues
Fusion-io isn’t the only company offering flash storage in a non-disk format, but they do seem to be furthest along. I think their perspective is way more important than, say, Seagate’s. Here’s the video.