However … in the last 2 hours of trolling the web to see if our marketing team really do work as hard as they say (yes Scott, we’re watching) … I’ve seen some pretty crazy feedback on a few websites. Pretty much some people just didn’t get it.

As much as I dislike turning this into a tech support forum, there is obviously a need for a bit of discussion on this new stuff, so ask away …

Ciao
Neil

If you go to the Adaptec home page, down on the bottom right hand side is the “Follow Us” tab. Inside you’ll find Facebook, Twitter and THEN the storage blogs. I suppose its a sign of the times that I’ve been usurped by something developed by someone who wasn’t even born when I learned to type.

About the only saving grace of all of these technologies is that (a) I can now ask my kids for help rather than them asking me to do their homework and (b) all this digital “stuff” (I can’t bring myself to call it something real) needs to be stored somewhere.

Since we’re in the storage industry I suppose that’s a good thing. Therefore keep twibbling, blottering, clogging, facepainting or whatever you call it … it’s good for business (even if I don’t understand it).

Now where did I put that chisel and hammer … I need to write some more.

Ciao
Neil

Trouble is, of course, it depends on what magazine you read, or analyst you listen to, as to what the future holds.

Personally speaking, I’m finding a lot of interest in SAN. It’s a quiet revolution being driven by the Virtual Storage Crowd. If you are gong to virtualise your servers then you’d better put all their storage on a box you can expand, manipulate, mirror etc … not just in direct-attached drives. The fibre market is still prohibitive in cost for the SMB, but iSCSI helps to bring that back to reality.

Of course, there is a big market for direct-attached even in the virtual server world. There are a lot of smaller users who want to run just a few servers on the one piece of hardware and direct-attached storage is fine for them. But as the number of virtual and physical servers increases, and the complexity of the virtual world and server infrastructure grows, so does the pressure to move the storage for VM’s, data and virtual desktop images onto SAN storage where you have better flexibility.

So at the moment it appears it’s the larger end of town that is interested in SAN, with the smaller side of things sticking with direct-attached storage. But for how long? Send me your thoughts on where your organisations are going with SAN vs DAS.

Ciao
Neil

I hope people appreciate how long it takes me to come up with these snappy headlines.

Just spent a few days at Computex in Taiwan … wading through a mountain of new equipment, motherboards, memory modules and especially, importantly and all-pervasively … Solid State Drives (SSDs).

They were everywhere. It seems that there are thousands of these things on the market, ranging from well-known to never heard of. Of course, they are flavour of the month and have a very large target audience, but it was amazing to see how many brands are on the market.

Now my focus is on storage, especially in the server arena. While I would have loved someone to give me one of these babies for my laptop that didn’t seem to happen, so I whiled away my time asking questions of these manufacturers. Now to be fair, there were a lot of very pretty young ladies trying to sell product whom I don’t think were product experts, but there were also the supposed “product experts” hanging around the back of the stand trying not to be bored to death by several hundred thousand tyre-kickers, so there was knowledge there if you asked hard enough questions.

Now what sort of questions would be “hard” questions for the SSD industry? Simply (a) are you using SLC or MLC technology, (b) what are your performance figures and (c) how long do you expect this drive to last in my laptop and an average database server (maybe a 50-user SQL environment).

Question A generally drew some blank looks, but reading the tech specs found the answer (which was, to a very large degree, MLC). Question B was easy … everyone has amazing figures on display (take all with a dose of salt) so there’s no shortage of amazing claims out there.

Question C had people running for cover. “Oh, we are not targetting the server market” was the well-practiced standard response by most manufacturer’s representatives. However when we got to discussing their view of the future drive market, all seemed of the opinion that SSD would certainly take over the SAS market, and that SATA would come under threat as the size of SSD increases and the price comes down.

Great, so I want to build a database server. Yesterday I would have used 4 x 15K RPM SAS drives in a RAID 10 configuration to get my best combination of read and write performance (especially on small writes) and pretty-well-sorted reliability. Today the “new age” drive industry would have me using 4 x SSD drives in the same config with amazing IOP and throughput figures.

So I build my system with SSD … how long will it last? I am aware of the long write-life of SLC technology, but it also has an amazing cost involved, so many people will not use those drives, but drop for what seem a better bargain (which happen to be MLC drives). Now I don’t believe MLC has anywhere near the write life of SLC, so exactly how long will this server last before things start going terribly wrong with my storage.

With my SAS investment I could easily expect 3 years, and more likely 5 years good use (on average) from my expensive, hot, expensive to run and heavy SAS drives, but what will MLC give me? That one I could not get an answer for.

Now the SSD drive experts and manufacturers out there will read this and immediately start yelling at me that I’m using the drive out of it’s intended target usage pattern, and that I should be using SLC technology, however these are the same people telling customers that they should use SSD for everything and omitting the relatively important information about drive life when selling the product and making amazing claims to customers about size and speed, glossing over the underlying technology questions.

Don’t get me wrong … I think SSD is great, it’s here to stay and I want one sooner rather than later, but there are a lot of variables out there with these drives, and Joe Public doesn’t seem to have much of a clue.

It’s either “buyer beware” or do your research first.

Ciao
Neil

Reading my local computer rag “Computerworld” I came across the following article: “Gartner: Aussies to shun cloud computing this year … Pragmatic attitude of local IT managers cuts through the marketing hype”. (So yes, now you know where I reside.)

There’s a corker of a line in here: “The cloud name give a sense that anything will apply to it … it can be considered a large amorphous concept, but to an Aussie that’s not useful.”

Not useful? If you can’t cook a Shrimp on it or crack a tinnie with it then of course it’s not useful. The article goes on to state “About 50% of businesses said they will increase investment in virtualisation, on top of an already high investment” and “Cloud is nothing more than a further step … a continuation of trends”.

So lets look at this “cloud” stuff. It’s pretty hard not to read about it these days … virtual flavour of the month as far as I can tell. However I have a problem with the name … “Cloud” is just plain too vague to really mean anything useful to the average IT Manager struggling under the pressure of keeping costs down, doing more with less and generally getting stressed at his/her lot in life.

Try going to your boss and telling him/her … “we need a cloud in the backoffice to enable virtualisation of all server and desktops to provide software as a service throughout the corporate infrastructure”. You’re likely to get a “clout” across the ear rather than a “cloud” as you intended.

The term “cloud” is great for journalists, bloggers and politicians … talk all day without saying anything, but it doesn’t seem to have jelled too well with Joe Public Computer Professional and it certainly isn’t finding a home with the economic decision maker in business … your Finance Manager for example.

So to lessen the confusion, clear the indecision and illuminate all those in the dark, I’m suggesting a new term be used instead of “cloud” … “large vague grey computing concept”.

That way, the magazine headline could have read: “Gartner: Aussies to shun large vague grey computing concept this year”.

Now that makes much more sense.

Ciao
Neil