September 10, 2009 – 8:39 am
“Server hugging” – the tendency of programmers to want their servers nearby like a warm security blanket – is not unique to Microsoft.
There’s a broader and more insidious ailment that affects IT organizations everywhere: can I sleep at night if my businesses’ data is out on the cloud? Let’s call it data hugging.
Data hugging is understandable. IT organizations are the stewards of a corporation’s digital crown jewels. It’s in their name, it’s why they exist.
With growth comes change, and IT needs to let go of their sentimental attachments to their data’s location. Cloud Computing is here to stay. It’s not for every byte and everyone, but it has a place in most organizations’ plans.
It’s time to set feelings aside and apply dispassionate business-based analysis to the in-house vs. Cloud analysis.
August 21, 2009 – 1:32 pm
Steve Duplessie sees scarcity as the driving force driving IT into the Cloud. It’s a compelling and insightful perspective – check it out.
He says that scarcity drives all decisions, and that what’s scarce today in IT has shifted away from processing power, storage capacity and network bandwidth to time and money. This will lead to the end of non-cloud IT as we know it.
Admittedly, I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy. But I wonder if Steve’s view isn’t a bit too pessimistic.
The other side of scarcity in Chris Anderson’s theory is abundance. Abundance in IT is good – it makes data virtually “free” and opens the door to new applications and new opportunities that spawn a whole new level of demand for data. Before you know it, there’s a shortage of storage, processing or bandwidth – albeit at a lower price.
I do agree with Steve that efficient management is the key. But it applies to technology being implemented in home-grown data centers just as much as in the Cloud. This Equallogic example from Steve himself is a case in point.
Mr. Duplessie is on to something, but the pendulum will continue to swing to and fro. In no time at all, management will become abundant and storage will be scarce yet again.
August 17, 2009 – 9:11 am
If you think you’ve got a lot of data, check out GigaOm’s look at some of the largest data giants ever. Facebook, for example, is expecting to store its 100 billionth photo this year.
How are they doing it? It’s about their software more than their hardware, because the software determines a lot about the physicial infrastructure required.
Facebook, Amazon and Google are all decoupling their systems from proprietary hardware. The extreme scale of their data storage makes it necessary to strip away anything that isn’t absolutely necessary for storing and recalling petabytes or exabytes of data safely and efficiently.
Does this trend foretell the future of enterprise storage in general? It’s not clear, but businesses have the same challenges on a smaller scale.
Is so, there is change and turmoil ahead for the established IT vendor world order. What else is new?
By Pete Steege
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Also posted in Data Center, Storage Systems, Trends
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Tagged Amazon, data, data center, exabytes, facebook, file system, GigaOm, google, petabytes, plans, storage, strategy, Trends, unstructured data, Yahoo
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The New York Times’ Tom Vanderbilt had an “inimical incuriosity” (now there’s some fancy New York vocabulary for you) about data centers before he wrote this thoughtful article. One can imagine his eyes bugging out as he is exposed to all the extreme technology coursing through the veins of these building/machines that power the data coursing through so many parts of our lives.
Highlights:
- Electrical and mechanical infrastructure of a data center is 82%, vs. about 10% for a normal building.
- Ten to thirty percent of servers at any one time are ‘comatose’ – powered on but not doing anything
- Data centers now consume more energy than Sweden
- In the next 5 years, 90% of data centers will be disrupted due to power constraints
- “Our perspective long term is: It’s not a building, it’s a piece of equipment,” Daniel Costello, Microsoft’s director of data-center research.
Thanks to Rich Miller at Data Center Knowledge for the heads-up on this.
By Pete Steege
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Also posted in Data Center
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Tagged architecture, data center, Data Center Knowledge, Magazine, microsoft, New York Times, NY Times, NYTimes.com, Rich Miller, Tom Vanderbilt, xbox
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With the ever-increasing amounts of data storage requirements, IT managers are running out of floor space to house it all. In fact, in a Storage Magazine’s recent survey, seventy-one percent of respondents indicated that “Managing rapidly growing capacity requirements” is their biggest problem.
Typically we see overflow racks creeping into corners of the employee kitchens or even the proverbial closet once reserved for coats and umbrellas. But believe it or not, I recently heard of a Data Center manager who had resorted to using “roof-top storage” for his burgeoning storage need. Yes, I mean literally moving some of his data storage to the roof of his building! (Kind of gives a new meaning to “Storage in the cloud”, doesn’t it, Pete?)
At this rate, could this really be that far off in the future? With the advent of durable, weather-resistant, storage containers like PODs (Portable On-Demand Storage), is this a reality for housing our archived or nearline data and if so — what will a storage array look like that needs to operate in this kind of environment?
Looking for another option? Try the 2.5-inch hard drives (Constellation for nearline environments) and increase your space savings by 70% over traditional 3.5-inch hard drives. (And you’ll gain on power & cooling efficiencies at the same time)
Running out of room in your data center? Let us know what options you’re looking at for your next rack?
Browse through IT equipment of the past at IBM’s Antique Attic. I like old stuff and craftsmanship – it’s refreshing to see wood and brass part of an information processing solution. IBM’s impressive collection brings some long-term perspective to what IT is all about.
Storage has been part of things from the beginning. Even the ancient abacus in IBM’s attic has a storage capacity of a few bytes . Pretty easy to erase, too.
Two constants over the centuries:
- processors get faster and smaller
- storage gets digitally bigger and physically smaller
These are the engines that have driven the scale of our solutions from the abacus to the data center. The newest generation of storage arrays are combining things at higher and higher levels. The largest vendors are rolling out data center-wide constructs; others are creating unique combinations like tiered-storage-in-a-box and disk-drives-in-a-can.
Robin Harris sees the next step to be multiple data centers aligning and combining in much the way disk drives work together in a RAID system.
What’s your take? What’s the most useful unit of scale for storage: drive, array data center, or cloud?
Photo source: IBM
By Pete Steege
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Also posted in Data Center, Trends
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Tagged antique attic, Compellent, data center, history, ibm, Inside IT Storage, IT, museum, Pete Steege, storage, Xiotech
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