This Week in Storage (2-13-09)

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In: Cloud Storage | 5 Minutes Ago: Utility Storage | Out: Grid Storage

Storage Explained: Cloud storage
Is your definition of Cloud Storage…cloudy? This article gives a good general overview and definition. Cool stat: Amazon S3 held 800,000 objects at the end Q2 06, grew to 5 billion in a year, and then to 40 billion by the end of 2008.

HP releases first LeftHand iSCSI SAN products
Good to see after last year’s $360M acquisition. The new SAN product comes in a two-node configuration (with HP ProLiant servers of course), is SAS-based (15,000 rpm), and offers 4.8TB at $35,000. HP is positioning LeftHand products for the server virtualization market.

IBM updates DS8000, XIV, deduplication and cloud
Speculation of DS8000’s longevity arose after the XIV acquisition at IBM. But it looks like IBM is still investing – DS8000 will support FC-attached SSDs (from STEC), and DB2 for z/OS will automatically place active database tables on SSD. DS8000 will also offer Seagate disk encryption. Still no thin provisioning however.

HP, IBM, EMC propose encryption key management standard
What happens when you lose your encryption key? You lose your data! So, the “key” to encryption is good Key Management. The right players (major vendors + RSA) are aligned around the newly proposed Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) spec. This is one area where a standard is needed.

Obama stimulus plan offers funding for storage, IT industries
I like the technology investments in the stimulus plan, for example – $20 billion for digitizing healthcare records. More money coming into our industry is a good thing. But, like a lot of other taxpayers, I’d still like more detail on the planned stimulus spending and anticipated results. That’s a lot of our money going to a lot of different places, thrown together in a very short amount of time…

IBM XIV Announcement, Meh?
Storagebod chimes in on IBM’s XIV announcement…he’s not too excited. IBM launched a smaller version of XIV – it had an 80TB model last year, and now has a 27TB model. Still no added software functionality like replication, dedup, etc. So the jury is still out for XIV and IBM is still looking for a good market for it – maybe it started too high (Moshe would like nothing better than to take out DMX), and they are trying to make it play more down-market.

Quantum holographic storage
Awesome article for the storage geek. If the air I am breathing feels a little too thick, it may be because some scientists have crammed bits of data into the electrons around me…

Top 4 things that impact storage costs
David Merrill is spot on with his potentially wasted space analysis. He talks about four main capacity-draining causes. Although we have identified around 8-10 causes, he hits the nail on the head…

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