Welcome to the Masters of Enterprise Storage Solutions Center. Every day this site will supply you with a plethora of news of the ‘storage’ type.
You can visit Masters of Enterprise Storage to learn of newest storage advancements, issues and product announcements – issues such as Fibre Channel over Ethernet and whether Cisco’s, QLogic’s, Emulex’ or Brocade’s plans for the technology make sense. Or consider where the industry is on solid state drives – do you add SSDs as a tier 0 of storage or as Pillar Data does with its SSDs as a QoS level for the most transaction-intensive operations. Or even where NetApp stands on unified architectures.
The site will include a weekly blog, briefs on new storage technologies and products, and links to stories on IDG’s sites about storage – Network World, InfoWorld, Computerworld and CIO. Add to all that a blog roll, which features popular bloggers from NetApp’s Dave Hitz and Enterprise Strategy Group’s Steve Duplessie.
So saying that, plan on visiting this site every morning to satisfy your storage appetite – if you have suggestions on how the site can be improved or how we can get you the information you need, e-mail me with suggestions at dconnor@ssg-now.com. So starting out, here’s something to chew on.
Solid State Drives: Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD)
The standard response to new technology – FUD — is the current situation facing many CIOs in the technology acquisition cycle involving Solid State Drives (SSD).
Vendors who don’t have SSDs are pointing to the issues related to adoption: Flash-based SSDs wear out. Every time you write an SSD (erase-program) the underlying hardware weakens. SSD providers answer that hard disk drives have similar problems that are multiplied by mechanics and electromagnetic field issues that introduce another layer of errors that have been hidden for years by advanced forward error correction strategies and the well-published 1000n to 1024n ratio.
If you follow all that techno-babble, God bless you. If you don’t, please take comfort in the adoption of SSDs by such reliable vendors as Pillar Data, HP and Dell. While the technology wave of SSD implementations are only starting, recognize that the available SSD products are there for those who need the bandwidth provided by the devices. Stay tuned for the next generation of these systems as the technology comes of age.
