Sun Updates Open Storage

Sun is continuing down the road of Open Storage:

"In 2007, for example, the company published the source code on a number of its NAS technologies, including the ZFS file system and parallel NFS. In April 2008, Sun formally announced its OpenSolaris Storage initiative, opening up Solaris code related to iSCSI device drivers, QLogic Fibre Channel HBA drivers, and Java implementations of the RPC and NFS protocols, so third parties could enhance its solutions. In addition, new developer tools and expanded professional services were designed to make it simpler for third parties to deliver OpenSolaris Storage solutions.

"To change its marketing approach successfully, Sun will have to make its plans clear to end users. “Potential customers will have to understand that Sun’s movement to open source is not just a concept; the technology will be incorporated into various Sun products,” said Forrester’s Balaouras. The vendor has tried to do that with recent announcements of the Sun Fire X4500 family of hybrid server/storage systems and its J4000 line of storage arrays." Full Story

Data Corruption: Dedupe's Achilles Heel

Our favorite Storage pundit Henry Newman writes on data de-duplication the nemesis of data corruption:

"I am a firm believer in the reality of undetected data corruption. It has happened to me and I have seen it happen to others, and sooner or later it will happen to you. I am also a firm believer in the new T10 Data Integrity Field standard, which passes an 8 byte checksum from the host to the disk and has the disk confirm the checksum, which should be generally available from a number of vendors likely later this year." Full Story

SDSC Gets Set for Storage Explosion

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), which has one of the largest SANs in U.S. academia, is overhauling its hulking 28-Pbyte storage system to support some spectacular data growth:

"Sun/StorageTek tape libraries account for most of SDSC’s SAN infrastructure, containing up to 25 Pbytes of data. This is supplemented by 2.5 Pbytes of disk storage on Sun Fire 15K and 12K servers, DataDirect Networks S2A Arrays, and a 50-Tbyte AMS system from HDS." Full Story

Big Data Changes the Rules

HPC Wire's Michael Feldman writes that enormous data sets are forcing us to rethink the way traditional science is performed:

"I suppose taking the human element out of problem-solving is the logical end to all science becoming computer science. And it certainly is a capitalist-friendly way of doing business. After all, why bother employing dozens of domain experts when you can just buy or rent some software in the cloud? But even if the petabyte age brings an end to theories and models, humans aren't completely expendable. We still get to ask the interesting questions." Full Story

Are Linux File Systems Right for You?

Storage pundit Henry Newman has set off a "firestorm" of comments with a recent article that questions the scalability of standalone Linux file systems vs. standalone symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) file systems available from companies like Sun.

"None of this is to say I am anti-Linux; nor am I pro-AIX or pro-Solaris. I am not even anti-Windows, since I use a Windows laptop as my main computer. But I do believe that the default Linux file systems are not yet up to the task of replacing the high-performance, highly scalable SMP file systems. Computers are tools, and operating systems and file systems are also tools in the toolbox. No one should use a chainsaw in place of a jigsaw, and the same analogy can be used for operating systems, file systems and the hardware on which they run." Full Story

White Paper: Best Practices for Architecting a Lustre-Based Storage Environment

In this white paper by Data Direct Networks, you'll learn best practices for architecting a Lustre-based storage environment. While many approaches can be taken to building up a Lustre environment, it is important to be aware of the trade-offs associated with various design decisions. Full Story

Sun Rolls Out Storage & Archive Solution for HPC

The new Sun Storage and Archive Solution for HPC enables you to manage the balance between high-performance access to your data when needed and cost effective, lower-performance storage for large amounts of data over the long term. Built with an architecture that supports multiple storage tiers, the solution provides high-performance storage for current use, bulk disk storage for low-performance needs, and long-term storage on power-efficient tape for data requiring only occasional access. Data movement or migration is managed through anautomated policy engine to help ensure that the right data is in the right place at the right time.

What makes this offering unique is that it's a complete storage solution for HPC requirements:

"That's really its strength," said Chris Wood, CTO of Sun Data Storage. "It's not a just a NAS filer, it's not a tape drive, it's not a box--it's a complete solution that addresses the very specific data types you run into in an HPC environment. And not to forget, Sun recently has brought into its family the Lustre file system, a very, very high performance scratch file system for HPC. We of course are seamlessly integrated with Lustre, so you can use them both. And what you get out of that is the multiple-petabyte scratch capability of Lustre, with the complete, system-managed, multi-tiered archive of the SAM-QFS side of the house, with the seamless ability to move the data between the two at extraordinarily high bandwidth." Full Story.

Transforming Big Data

In this HPC Wire story, John E. West writes that the dramatic growth in data we humans collect needs better data-intensive computing schemes:

"As Grosh pointed out, the shift that is needed goes to the core of system design. Disk vendors have largely focused on capacity rather than bandwidth, and many supercomputing applications avoid I/O as much as possible. In data intensive applications, this view is turned on its head: it's all about moving stored data in for processing, and pushing transformed data out. According to Grosh, NVRAM technology may be very important on the hardware front in the future of data intensive supercomputing. It offers an architecturally "clean slate" that doesn't carry any of the design culture of disk storage along with it, and it may be able to fill the gap between DRAM and disk with respect to both price per capacity and access speed." Full Story.

Top 10 storage predictions for 2008

IT managers looking to boost storage efficiency next year will embrace online storage services, push de-duplication in the data center and adopt solid-state disk drives to help fuel hardware consolidation strategies and green initiatives, according to IDC's top 10 storage predictions for 2008.

"The top 10 storage industry predictions by the Framingham, Mass.-based market research company expected to arrive in 2008 include:

1. Storage services models for data backup, archiving and replication will be more appealing to businesses.
2. New role-based storage systems will demand tighter integration between the storage layer and content-generating applications.
3. Vendors will build object-based storage systems to classify data and add policies closer to the point of creation.
4. Falling prices of solid-state disk drives will push mainstream adoption.
5. Virtual servers will become an ideal conduit for iSCSI.
6. Value-added storage services will become nontethered from storage infrastructure.
7. Full-disk encryption will be prevalent in the data center to satisfy compliance and safe harbor provision rules.
8. Offerings designed for small and midsize businesses featuring integrated storage and server technology will flood the storage market.
9. Green storage initiatives will cause companies to seek nondisruptive/partial hardware upgrades.
10. De-duplication, thin provisioning and virtual tape libraries will be in demand because of power saving efforts in the data center." Full Story

Clustered storage: a paradigm shift

According to Continuity Central, the need for clustered storage systems continues to grow across multiple vertical markets and industries:

"Indeed, as more companies turn to clustered computing for their IT needs, clustered storage has become an extremely attractive solution to complement their computational infrastructures, enhancing data collection and analysis to deliver better business results." Full Story

Petabyte of Angels on the Head of a Pin

A team of UCLA and California Institute of Technology chemists reports in the Jan. 25 issue of the journal Nature the successful demonstration of a large-scale, "ultra-dense" memory device that stores information using reconfigurable molecular switches. This research represents an important step toward the creation of molecular computers that are much smaller and could be more powerful than today's silicon-based computers.

"In 1959, physicist Richard Feynman said it should be possible some day to store all of the Encyclopedia Britannica on the tip of a needle," noted UCLA's J. Fraser Stoddart. "We're not there yet, but we're not far off." Full Story