This Week in Storage (12-19-08)

Jingle bell storage: What to buy a geek
A great list for the geek in your life. Best gift idea? Kiva.org! I’m the geek Beth mentions in the last paragraph. My buddy who gave me the gift? CBS news’ Hari Sreenivasan.

Economic Downturn Hits Storage Spending
Ok – so I think we all know that our IT budgets will be flat or cut next year. We also know that data will continue to grow (and grow fast) regardless of what we do with our budgets. So what to do? Optimize, optimize, optimize. If you haven’t run a formal efficiency and optimization program in your storage infrastructure environment, then you are overlooking a huge chuck of wasted capacity and space. The storage utilization and allocation rates are far worse than most vendors are telling us (I know b/c I came from one!) It’s not in their best interested to sell less storage, but it is in yours to buy less…

The state of data backup in 2009, Part 3
Good reading in Beth’s Data Backup series – this issue covers disaster recovery and the emergence of Cloud backup. Amazon was first to market with S3, EMC came out with Mozy, and Beth writes about Symantec’s offering…

Symantec adds change management to SRM
Symamtec mentions making agentless options available too. When I work with IT admins this is top of their list – they don’t like agents crawling all over their environment. I understand – but agents will still be around, maybe minimized. ESG says that SRM tools aren’t viewed as a must-have – this is unfortunate. There is HUGE value in them – but you need to know (or have a partner that knows) how to deploy them, interpret them, and ACT upon the data. If you don’t take this step, you just bought shelf-ware. You do this, and you can free between 30% – 70% of your capacity – I’ve seen this done with multiple infrastructures and count THAT as a must have.

Brocade Buys Foundry Networks for $3B
Brocade drops $3B to pick up Foundry – a good move on the surface. This will make them more competitive with Cisco – offering LAN and WAN equip. 10GbE still looks to be a great bet, and networking companies are investing in it. See Stephen Foskett’s blog.

HDS embraces SSDs
HDS is a little late to the party (EMC led the charge, followed by Sun and others). But USP is a great disk system, and SSD will make it better. STEC is making out as the SSD partner to have. Again – if you have any apps that live or die by latency times, you need to be researching SSD options.

“Despereaux” uses clustered storage
For you HPC junkies, the movie “Despereaux” had to chunk through 1,700 shots and 90 million images. They did it the way most do, Linux clusters running an HPC filesystem – this one Lustre. They stored 200TB of generated data on Infortrend’s EonStor RAID system (comment if you know anything about EonStor – I don’t). I’ll probably take my boy to the movie and bore him on the details on how it was made…