SNW Ramblings
So after a week of recovering from the excitement of SNW - what did I learn?
Well, I think three trends emerged from the show.
The show floor at SNW was full of exciting and new storage devices. Most use general purpose servers (AMD or Intel – both at SNW this year) and an Open Source operating systems like Linux or Solaris. The problem with most of them (mostly the ones running Linux) is that while the suppliers are getting the economic benefit – the customers don't seem to be yet. Still lots of 70% margin gadgets on the floor.
I say most of them because there are some exceptions – mostly around Solaris and the Sun X4500 (aka Thumper). You could see Thumper on the show floor running Solaris and any number of applications, including:
— IPConfig for video surveillance— Greenplum for open source data warehousing
— Luminex for a mainframe virtual channel
— FalconStor for remote backup using IPStore
— BakBone for data protection
Five great examples of how a customer can get the benefits of low cost hardware, open source software and storage applications.
2. Storage Virtualization is bananas.
I think we can mostly accept that storage virtualization is NOW not tomorrow. I asked people why they thought this had 'tipped' this year and the answer: VMWare. So many virtual servers are causing a huge need for storage virtualization. Still, lots of choices in the market and all will not survive. Time to pick your favorite.
3. Disk goes deep.
We all know that the role of tape in our customers environments is changing – not going away, just changing. Despite that fact, every year there is another technology that claims to be the death of tape. Not sure I saw one technology this year that made that claim, but there is an emerging set that may further change the landscape.
Imagine this: hundreds of hard disks, that are interchangeable for bigger drives at any time, that can be bought in your local computer store with 5-9s availability and SW RAID, which can be powered up or powered down, where your data is de-duplicated and then backed off to tape. Sound interesting? Sound like deep archive on disk?
Maybe. Time will tell.
Posted at 08:22AM Apr 26, 2007 by Nigel Dessau in Sun Storage | Comments[0]