* What was hot at the Storage Networking World
Several trends are beginning to appear that you should make note of
At Storage Networking World in Orlando last week I spent most of my time getting together with clients, talking with several vendors with whom I usually don’t get to spend much time, tracking down old friends, and – when time allowed – attending the odd demonstration. Also, I had the opportunity – only partially successful – to try to explain baseball to EMC’s Norwegian rep during Game 4 of the World Series. He was gracious and toasted the success of the Boston team, but for some odd reason he didn’t seem quite as excited about the outcome as I was. Go figure.
I had several nice experiences meeting with my readers. If you were one of those who were thoughtful enough to take the time to track me down and say “Hi,” thanks. Those meetings, however brief, are always a pleasure.
Many of the technology highlights took place during the interoperability demonstrations – I’ll talk about that in Thursday’s newsletter – but several trends are beginning to appear that you should make note of. Here is a brief list of some of the things you might want to listen for during the next few months when the sales reps come a-visiting.
Apple is not just for the desktop these days. Here was a surprise: Apple has been crisping up its storage offerings of late, and it looks as if it is serious about being an enterprise storage player. It might be worthwhile spending a few minutes on the storage part of the Apple Web site. More on Apple and what it plans on doing in storage in a few weeks.
SATA continues to gain acceptance in the central IT room. SATA drives, cheaper and less robust than either SCSI or Fibre Channel drives, are often just fine for any number of enterprise IT tasks, and we saw many new and well-funded vendors with SATA arrays on the show floor. A year ago many of the larger vendors pooh-poohed the idea of SATA at an enterprise IT location. None of them are so stupid as to do that now, and all of them have SATA offerings of their own, usually positioned as second-tier storage.
“Continuous data protection” (CDP) was the new buzzword being hyped this year. CDP is continuous backup, a very granular form of snapshotting in which a new snapshot is executed for each change that occurs. The changes are journaled, and thus are easily tracked. As long as the snapshots are kept on disk, recoveries should be swift. Think of this as an evolutionary change, which increases the likelihood that this will turn out to be “buzz” with substance. Increased ability to reach out to monitor the storage-area network (and beyond) has arrived.
Much-improved tools for SAN monitoring are now available, some coming from vendors that have provided similar tools to networking engineers for years. I’ve spent a lot of time in the past pointing out that just because a vendor offers monitoring doesn’t mean it can also provide the ability to manage. But it is important to call attention to the fact that good monitoring capability is the first – mandatory – step in any management effort. If you can’t monitor, you can’t analyze, and if you can’t analyze, you can’t manage.
Microsoft Virtual Disk Service (VDS) provides users of Windows Server 2003 and Windows Storage Server 2003 with some basic block-level management capability, including discovery, simple RAID management and monitoring. It is aimed at small and midsize business managers who don’t have a storage go-to guy on staff; so it may not be as full-featured as some managers would like, but for those who might want a simple tool for a basic storage management interface this may be a good start. As VDS has no support for the SNIA’s SMI standard, however, it has questionable relevance at this time for larger environments that want to manage high-end and Microsoft-based storage through a common management interface.
Next time: The interoperability and solutions demos.
