Jul 08 18
Will you manage in the exabyte era?
Posted by Angus Kidman @ 11:26 0 comments
Mammoth growth in storage volumes is a fact of life, but even so it's helpful to pause occasionally and try and work out whether our information strategies have fallen hopelessly out of step with the pace of technological growth and changes in costs.
I was reminded of this during the week while hanging out at the Hitachi Data System SAN Technology Centre in Odawara and talking to Hubert Yoshida, HDS' chief technology officer. Yoshida predicts that storage volumes are about to cross an important threshold.
"We expect that within the next three to five years we will have a customer with an exabyte of data," Yoshida said. "Today we have customers with close to 100 petabytes."
What can you realistically do to manage a million terabytes or more of information (or 100 petabytes for that matter)? Whatever the answer, it's unlikely to be found in current systems.
"Even though in storage we have been doubling in capacity almost ever year, the basic architecture of storage systems is in many cases 20 years old." That approach won't be sustainable in the exabyte era, Yoshida suggests: "It requires a new approach and architecture. We have to have a fundamental change in the way we do architectures and implement technologies. It's not just a matter of getting bigger disks, we have to change the way they work together."
A critical area for improvement is interconnect speeds. "As we move towards exabytes of storage, we can't afford to move every byte across the network," Yoshida said. As well as faster pipes, intelligent processing (such as de-duplication and compression) can help simplify that problem.
In the short term, one useful strategy is to focus less on three-year storage capacity plans, Yoshida suggested. "Instead of buying all this big storage today, buy what you need as you need it — because capacity always gets cheaper."
Angus Kidman travelled to Japan as a guest of HDS.
Jul 08 9
Is the cloud your disaster recovery solution?
Posted by Angus Kidman @ 15:58 1 comments
Software as a service (SaaS) is normally sold on the basis of a fairly simple costing equation: no staff to pay for maintenance and no capital costs for equipment or licences. So it's not surprising that its role in helping develop effective disaster recovery plans tends to get shoved to one side a bit.
Yet shoving everything into a hosted environment does effectively create a quick and dirty disaster recovery strategy. If most of the services you need can be accessed via a conventional PC with an Internet connection, then the inability to get to your main premises might not require failing over to a backup location.
I was reminded on this during a recent lunchtime meeting with Michael Bishop, the general manager of Queensland managed speech services company SmartSpeak Solutions. ...Read more
Jul 08 2
I'm a celebrity, don't back me up
Posted by Angus Kidman @ 16:42 0 comments
Celebrity comes with its perks — free alcohol, better-looking partners, lots of holiday time — and disadvantages — constant media intrusions, being forced to appear in films with Eddie Murphy for the long-term good of your career, and having to do mindless radio interviews with angry men who've been awake since 4am.
One of the less obvious disadvantages is that apparently the famous are far too busy (probably being manicured) to remember to back-up or to organise their data.
This is a topic which Snorage has touched on a couple of times before. Back in April, we looked at the sorry case of Scottish pop star Calvin Harris, who left the only copy of his latest album on a laptop in his checked baggage, which subsequently encountered the luggage-swallowing vortex that was (and perhaps still is) Heathrow Terminal 5. There's been no word yet on whether Harris ever got the bag back, but hopefully he's at least downloaded a copy of SyncBackSE. ...Read more
Jun 08 24
Sticky situations for USB stick support
Posted by Angus Kidman @ 15:56 1 comments
There's an argument against the usage of USB sticks which has been discussed many times in this column: they're a potentially massive security risk. But there's another case you could make against having your business life stored in 4GB or so of flash memory — it's a total support nightmare.
I was reminded of this possibility during a presentation by Chris Wickham, customer services manager for Wellington City Council in New Zealand, at the recent ITSM conference on the Gold Coast.
While local councils in the Antipodes don't (to be brutally frank) enjoy a reputation as cutting-edge deployers of advanced technology, Wellington has been working hard to update its systems, and a shift towards more portable technology has been a key element in that strategy. ...Read more
