Entries categorized under “Grid Storage”

However my intent is not to leave readers hanging or fretting as to what storage systems they can select that take this problem into account. The NEC HYDRAstor is one such product that has taken steps to address this issue. HYDRAstor includes a feature called Distributed Resilient Data™ (DRD) that is able to offer more protection than RAID 5 or RAID 6 without their rebuild performance drawbacks. Because HYDRAstor is based on a grid storage architecture, it can by default survive the failure of not only multiple disk drives but also multiple Storage Nodes. The default setting is 3 disk drives or 3 Storage Nodes if multiple nodes are present (based on the video on the HYDRAstor web site, it looks like a company needs at least 12 nodes for a company to have assurance it can recover from the failure of 3 different nodes). (read more)

Right now commercial data stores are on track to achieve the petascale range sooner rather than later. According to multiple sources, data collected and stored is doubling every year for most businesses; a rate of growth that has held fairly constant over time. In the 1990s, a 100 GB database was large enough to stress most systems - back when disk scanning speeds were 30 MB/s and database tools were relatively immature. In the current decade, terascale data stores are already common - and managing 100 GB is now considered somewhat trivial. In the coming decade, truly massive petascale systems can be expected to dwarf today's large multi-terabyte stores - requiring a similar leap in the technology being used to store and retrieve the data. (read more)

Almost any disk-based solution - deduplicating or otherwise - is going to expedite backups and recoveries. Sure, some solutions may deduplicate better or do it faster but at the end of the day most companies are at the point that putting in place any disk-based system that supports replication and deduplication is better than dealing with the current backup pain. However what companies often fail to account for is how fast their backup data stores grow when they start backing up data to disk. More than once I've talked to system administrators in companies where "undisclosed" or "hidden" departmental application servers start to come out of the woodwork once department managers hear that corporate IT backup processes actually work. (read more)

At recent storage conferences (Storage Decisions, Storage Networking World, etc.) replication has emerged as a hot topic of discussion among end-users. In talking with these different users and listening in on a number of end-user panel discussions, there are a number of factors that they attribute to their increased interest in using replication as part of their company's overall disk-based data protection strategy. (read more)

The Computerworld column I wrote a few weeks ago on the topic of "A Bit of a Flaw with SATA disk drives" sparked quite a bit of debate around just how safe is data on today's RAID-based storage systems that use SATA disk drives? A series of comments appeared on Computerworld's site where the column appeared as well as on a forum at Nabble's web site. Also, at least one storage system vendor felt obligated to send me their white paper that explains how its RAID-based storage system accounts for this bit error rate problem on SATA disk drives. (read more)

However as companies move towards archiving data on disk-based storage systems, you can't just always build bigger buildings or knock down walls. If anything, companies want to store more data in a smaller footprint. Making it more complicated, companies are creating exponentially more data than they were 10, 5 and even 2 years ago and keeping it for longer periods of time. Factor in mobile devices that manipulate existing data and create new data and the increasing use of video in corporations and the result is millions, billions and even trillions of file-based data elements that create thousands of terabytes of data. (read more)

I started out the day with an hour-long briefing with Xiotech's CTO Stephen J Sicola and Storage Architect Peter Selin. Xiotech has been talking up a storm about the ground-shaking importance of its new Intelligent Storage Elements (ISE) ever since Xiotech announced it at Storage Networking World about a month ago. However Xiotech and I have not had a chance to connect for me to take a close look at its architecture so Stephen and Peter spent some time talking me through it. (read more)

Despite some of the rumors that were floating around that user attendance was down and not as many vendors were in attendance, I did not necessarily find that the case. I ran into Lindsay Mullen, TechTarget's event coordinator, in the exhibit hall. She said that about 550 end-users had registered for the event and that she still expected another small influx of end-users on Wednesday. Also, in talking to other analysts and TechTarget editors who were in attendance, they said that all of the break-out sessions were full. The number of vendors exhibiting did, however, seem to be down from years past but not as much as I anticipated. Off-hand, I am guessing that the number of vendors exhibiting was about two-thirds of past events. (read more)

One can hardly have a conversation about storage management these days without the topic of archiving surfacing. Part of the reason that archiving is commanding more attention is because as companies create and keep ever greater amounts of referential data on their production storage systems, it is creating a host of new problems (read more)

Paulk revealed that he is now in full production with the production code loaded on the NEC HYDRAstor. However he is still using the same hardware configuration (two Accelerator Nodes and four Storage Nodes) that he started out using due to the high deduplication ratio that he is achieving with the HYDRAstor. Last fall he was achieving a 17:1 deduplication ratio and hoped to eventually achieve a 35:1 ratio. Six months later, his deduplication ratio is now approximately 39:1 which has mitigated his need to buy additional capacity and has driven his cost/GB down to approximately 70¢/GB. "It's like getting 390 TB for the price of 10 TBs," says Paulk. (read more)

NEC's Vice President of Advanced Storage Products, Karen Dutch, recently brought out some salient points about storage management in her Spring 2008 SNW presentation, "Defining Storage Solutions in the Data Center 2.0". Specifically, she described the features that new storage architectures should deliver in order to keep storage management manageable as storage growth in organizations continues. Of course, the not-so-subtle message is that NEC's HYDRAstor delivers on these new features. (read more)

A well-known study released by IDC in 2007 forecast that by 2010 the amount of information that will be copied and created in the global digital universe will climb to nearly 1 zettabyte (that's 1 million petabytes). That number was based on the assumption that there was approximately 160 exabytes of information in existence in 2006 and that global data growth will continue to grow at a year over year rate of 57%. Assuming that forecast holds true, this puts the total global store of information at or over 400 exabytes by the end of this year. (read more)

In part one of this two-part series, NEC's Director of Business Development, Dr. Christian Toelg, answered some specific technical questions about how Accelerator Nodes and Storage Nodes differ from one another. This second part takes a look at what specific advantages NEC's HYDRAstore grid storage architecture has over siloed, two controller storage system architectures when performing deduplication. (read more)

HYDRAstor uses a two-step inline process to deduplicate data. Two or more Accelerator Nodes may see the same file at the same time. However, Accelerator Nodes only have a part of the information required to do deduplication and do not maintain the entire global deduplication index. So the Accelerator Nodes chunk up each file into small chunks, eliminate as many duplicates as possible and then send the remaining chunks to the Storage Nodes. (read more)

The primary reason that many deduplicating appliances create data silos is that they are based on the traditional dual-controller storage system architecture. Dual-controller storage systems typically use two clustered servers that sit in front of a fixed pool of storage. The NEC HYDRAstor functions as one logical storage system regardless of how much performance or capacity a company adds so it can globally deduplicate all company archive or backup data stored on it (read more)

Deduplicating appliances have gained mindshare with users because it makes disk as cheap, or cheaper, than tape by delivering data reduction ratios of 15:1 or more while expediting backups which solves their short term backup problems. However companies also need to consider, when selecting a deduplication product, how well it will best serve them in the long term. The capability to globally deduplicate data is very powerful, but most deduplicating storage appliances are limited in scope to just that one appliance. (read more)

Data migrations are a painful part of storage management in most enterprise shops today. Driven by storage technology refreshes, storage upgrades, or optimizing data placement on storage systems to improve application performance, data migrations are an ongoing and laborious part of enterprise data management. Introducing disk into the backup process can once again re-introduce the pain point of data migrations. While the initial benefits that companies derive from using disk in any of its different formats in the backup process are usually substantial, the effort associated with managing and migrating backup data from disk to tape over time can become problematic. (read more)

Companies looking to introduce HYDRAstor into their backup environment should take into account that data deduplication is a destination and backup only the first stop in that journey. Data deduplication is changing the backup game but it has the potential longer term to change how companies store much of their data. It's when companies start to view deduplication from this larger viewpoint that they can begin to understand the significance of HYDRAstor's underlying grid architecture. (read more)

HYDRAstor's grid storage architecture conversely can start small but linearly and independently scale performance or capacity or both. HYDRAstor decouples performance nodes (called Accelerator Nodes) from capacity nodes (called Storage Nodes) creating two separate layers that act independently of one another and possess their own levels of intelligence. (read more)

Data recovery is where the rubber meets the road. However I am not sure if deduplication vendors always practice what they preach because vendors almost immediately divert the focus of users off of data recovery speeds and onto how fast... (read more)

As I was going through the job interview process for a storage administrator position nearly seven years ago, my prospective employer took me on a tour of the data center in which I was to eventually work. Having always... (read more)

The rapid emergence and acceptance of deduplication into the mainstream of enterprise storage in the last 18 - 24 months has been nothing short of phenomenal. Enterprise storage is a segment of the computer industry that typically measures change in... (read more)

It is the rare day where I wish I could leave the ranks of the analyst community and re-join the user community. Today was one of those days. Over the last couple of years I have carefully watched the... (read more)