Switching files

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Distributed file systems for storage may be just the beginning. The future of DFS really lies in file switching, says Barry Lynn, management consultant, venture capitalist and former CIO.

"As storage technology prices have, exponentially, over the years, become lower and lower, the justification for putting more and more online has materialized," Lynn says. "As a result, most enterprises have created 'monsters' - terabytes upon terabytes of online storage that is difficult and expensive to manage, often difficult to access and manipulate with high performance, and most importantly, difficult to catalog and find. This has resulted in situations of repetitive, redundant data existing all over the enterprise."

Lynn should know. Prior to founding Be eXceL management, a management consulting firm focusing on early stage technology companies, Lynn was with Wells Fargo for 16 years. Most recently, he had been president of Wells Fargo Technology Services and CIO of Wells Fargo and Co. (Lynn is also a general partner with Shoreline Venture Management, and serves on the board of DFS start-up Z-force and two other technology companies.)

Lynn believes that DFS is a good start for organizations wanting to move into storage pools. But until companies can move deeper and manage data at the file level - information representing a specific business need - rather than just managing the bits and bytes that reside on storage devices as if they are all the same, they've only addressed a portion of the problem. "I've often thought that the acronym DFS should stand for Distributed Filing System instead of Distributed File System, because [these products] don't really virtualize or aggregate files at all," Lynn says. "It is difficult to get optimal performance and cost benefits without getting down to the file level."

He points to new "file switch" storage technology, such as offered by Z-force, in Santa Clara, as the future. File switches will break large operations be into smaller ones, optimizing the use of all available resources and multithreading. He uses this analogy to make his point: "If 10 people are running a 100-meter dash, even the slowest runner will cross the finish line in a tiny fraction of the time that it would take one person to run 1,000 meters. But in both cases, 1,000 meters of distance have been covered."

Ryan-Garcia is a freelance journalist in Coram, N.Y., specializing in the storage industry. She can be reached at freshcontent@aol.com.

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