According to International Data Corp’s (IDC) Annual European Storage Survey companies are continuing to invest in growing their storage capacity despite the credit crunch squeezing many IT departments.
The concept of thin provisioning is really very simple; by being smarter in the way disk space is allocated less disk drives are needed. Consequently less power and space are needed, significant cost reductions are made and the corporate social responsibility requirement to produce a lower carbon footprint is satisfied. It looks like an all round winner!
Posted 24.10.08
According to The Storage IO Group “the combination of growing demand for electricity by data centres, density of power usage per square foot, rising energy costs, strained electricity generating and transmission (G&T) infrastructure and environmental awareness prompted the passage of a new law in The United States that instructed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to report to Congress on the state of IT data centres energy usage in the United States.”
Symantec note that “As companies integrate disk and discover its benefits as a more active component of their back up environments, they soon realize that they cannot keep all of their backup data on disk. Despite declines in the cost of disk storage, they still lack the available capacity to recover most data from disk locally in the data centre. Data de duplication is a disk-based technology that enables companies to eliminate duplicate backup data and significantly decrease the storage, and in some cases bandwidth, consumption.”
On 8th August 2008 a NetApp release noted the accelerated adoption of 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) storage connectivity by customers who want to optimize their virtual environments and improve power efficiencies in the data centre. Since launching 10GbE in 2006, NetApp has shipped more than 3,000 array ports. In fact, 54% of this total was delivered in 2008 alone, exemplifying the technology’s growing popularity and NetApp’s continued leadership in Ethernet storage.
The S Family (formerly StoreVault®) storage platform fits in Midsize Enterprise, as well as in large Enterprises with large numbers of Remote Office and Branch Office locations typically replicating to a core FAS.
The S Family enables midsize companies instantly to reduce storage costs by:
Data volumes in all organisations continue to grow relentlessly. Estimates vary between 50 – 70% a year.
Whichever way you look at it the growth rate is staggering and protecting this data, the core information that businesses rely on for growth, is a critical issue for both the IT industry and the customers whose needs it serves. It doesn’t help that these issues have to be addressed in the face of stiff budgetary constraints.
I was chatting to a potential customer the other day, looking at the pros and cons of de-duplication methods and it’s clear to me that most people still view de-duplication with a bit of trepidation.
While the mechanics of de-duplication are complex, it’s important to understand that de-duplication should be considered as just another process running on the storage system. We trust the storage system to write the data to disk as ones or zeros, that’s rocket science, so surely we can trust the system to get the de-duplication right.
Every year, it seems, is going to be the year iSCSI emerges as a serious threat to the continued dominance of Fibre Channel (FC) as the protocol of choice for Storage Area Networks (SANs). It finally looks as though it may be happening.
The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) is forecasting 50% growth for iSCSI implementations in the USA during the coming year. This is partly, they say, because acceptance by HDS, EMC and IBM has validated the protocol. It is now visible to a wider audience. This is not the full story.
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