Storage

Overheard - Deep fiber

Pushing fiber close to the customer is generically called “deep fiber,” and various acronyms are used to indicate just how deep the fiber is. FTTH means “fiber to the home,” which is the extreme of giving every user an optical-electrical termination. FTTC takes “fiber to the curb,” serving a group of homes, while FTTN means “fiber to the node” or “neighborhood.” Tom Nolle, Fiber-optic networks: Access network design

Overheard - Serial-attached SCSI (SAS)

“Beginning late 2006, major network server platform releases embraced 3Gb/s SAS and there has been no looking back.” Harry Mason, Serial Attached SCSI storage moves ahead in network server designs

Today I’m reading about SAS.

SAS is the only storage connect that embraces both the high-performance and high reliability disk drive offered with SAS connected drives, as well as providing native compatibility with low-cost per gigabyte SATA drives.

This capability allows common storage components to span a variety of storage environments, including tiered storage solutions. The ability of the storage system to scale is a critical attribute for enterprise critical data storage solutions.

Overheard - D2D2T (disk-to-disk-to-tape)

With D2D2T, you can transfer your data to disk at night at a much faster rate than to tape, and then migrate that data to tape, as you need to. Phil Pascarelli, D2D2T: is it quite right for you?

Unlike tape emulation, which replaces a tape drive with a virtual hard disk equivalent, D2D2T allows users to manage the storage of data closer to an Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) model. Users can specify the destination and duration of stored data as well as its replication and archive life. In addition, D2D2T offers an excellent data recovery option, allowing instant retrieval of lost or corrupted data. D2D2T is also able to address compliance legislation-based storage requirements.

Terabyte - two terabytes in the news

The National Archives lost a terabyte disk drive filled with sensitive data from the Clinton administration, including Social Security numbers and Secret Service procedures.  Had this data been on a self-encrypting drive, we would not have heard of its loss. Pete Steege, The National Archives lose a terabyte drive filled with sensitive data

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is terabyte. A terabyte (one trillion bytes) is in the news today for two reasons — a terabyte of data of data from the Clinton administration is missing from the National Archives and Amazon has announced a new cloud service called Import/Export for moving terabytes of data to the cloud.

The interesting thing about missing data from the Clinton administration is that it was on a 2-terabyte hard drive that was left sitting on a shelf for a couple of months. And guess what? The data on it was not encrypted. What the heck???

The Amazon announcement is another WTH.  The Import/Export service is being promoted as a way to move large datasets to and from the cloud (meaning Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).)

A terabyte is a lot of data and trying to push it up to Amazon over the Internet takes a lot of bandwidth.  With Amazon Import/Export, you can move the data by off-loading it to a portable storage device and then shipping the device to Amazon.  Amazon has a handy-dandy calculator for estimating the cost of service.  They will charge you $80 for moving the data from the portable device to the storage you’ve purchased at Amazon (along with a $2.49 per data-loading-hour surcharge) and then they’ll ship the device back to you.  It might sound pricey until you consider that uploading a terabyte of data over the Internet with your T1 line is likely to take 82 days.

And oh yeah,  you may want to take a lesson from the National Archives and encrypt that data before you ship it out.

Overheard - Another GDrive sighting

It would appear Google has its own Loch Ness monster, with mysterious sightings suggesting the existence of Google GDrive, Google’s mythical online storage service. Sylvie Barak, Mythical Gdrive surfaces in Google code

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves when bogger Brian Ussery stumbled across a wee bit of code hidden away in a Google Pack software bundle for Windows users, which appeared to contain GDrive’s product category and description.

Atlanta blogger Brian Ussery spotted a reference to the mythical GDrive last week — and started a blogswarm. The description said:

GoogleGDrive provides reliable storage for all of your files, including photos, music and documents. GDrive allows you to access your files from anywhere, anytime, and from any device - be it from your desktop, web browser or cellular phone.

OMG — what if the rumors in 2009 — as compared to the same rumors in 2006, 2007 and 2008 turned out to be true?

Sigh…

I think the only interesting thing, when we finally get confirmation that indeed — the GDrive is ready and available — will be how much free storage Google grants you. Microsoft started out with five but now gives you 25 GB for free with SkyDrive. If Google tops that, THEN I’ll be impressed.

Overheard - What color is your meter MAID? Green

Data center managers are starting to recognize that 70 percent to 90 percent of their data is not transactional in nature, but rather, persistent data that is rarely changed, and infrequently accessed…The key to managing persistent data is to deploy storage systems that are tuned specifically to its needs. One technology that is ideally suited for persistent data is MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) storage. Will Layton, Getting Ahead of the Data Storage Energy Crisis: The Case for MAID

Tonight I’ve been reading about MAID and how it can help cut energy costs in the data center by limiting the number of spinning disks.  This week’s buzzword (besides Obama) seems to have been “intelligent power management.”

Ironically, according to a CDW Corp. report titled “Energy Efficient Information Technology,” 94 percent of IT executives with purchasing responsibility said they cared about energy efficiency but had no idea how much energy their IT operations used — even though they realized that that knowledge is critical to energy reduction efforts.  CDW should have sent them all this list of low-hanging-fruit energy savers from SearchSMBStorage.com

Overheard - Top 5 tech stories in Australia

In case you weren’t one of the readers stampeding these stories, here’s are the most popular tales from across TechTarget’s five Australian sites in 2008:

1. SearchCIO readers could not get enough of this story comparing virtualisation wares from Microsoft and VMWare.

2. Career advice clearly appeals to networking professionals, who stampeded this piece about how certifications can improve your prospects at work.

3. Old-school is still big for security pros, who loved this piece about five command line tools to detect Windows hacks.

4. The blend of open source NAS and virtualisation proved the most popular mix for our storage-oriented readers.

5. Bluetooth for Business was the story of most interest to SearchVoIP ANZ readers in 2008.

Overheard: GPON and Active Ethernet are complementary technologies

PON (Passive Optical Network) and Active Ethernet have falsely been cast as competitive technologies when, in fact, they are complementary. David Russell, marketing director at Calix

Increasingly, GPON and Active Ethernet are being viewed as complementary technologies based on the application. GPON is ideal for mass residential and small business deployments, while Active Ethernet is sometimes preferred for larger businesses that demand dedicated fiber access.

Overheard: Deduplicating data and meeting nonrepudiation compliance requirements

Dedupe does not change data any more than compression changes data, or traditional file systems change data. Plain old LZ compression gives you a different output bitstream than what went in, with redundant parts removed, just like deduplication. But when you decompress the file, you get your exact original bitstream back. No information is lost. Conventional file systems break up files into blocks and scatter those blocks across one or more disks, requiring complicated algorithms to retrieve and reassemble the data. Dedupe is no different. Nonrepudiation requirements are satisfied by the reliability and immutability of the system as a whole, deduplicating or not. Jered Floyd, Deduplication is Not a Crime

Overheard: Heartbeat is the brains

Heartbeat is the brains used to automate all the steps needed to determine if a node is down, and run all the steps needed to bring the spare node up as primary. Mark Schoonover, MySQL 5 High Availability with DRBD 8 and Heartbeat 2