Starboard Storage Blog

Nearly 18 years ago now I moved from the UK to live in the USA in Houston, Texas. One of the first things you learn when moving to Texas is that “RAID® Kills Bugs”! I find it ironic that in the next few years we might be saying “Bugs Killed RAID”. In fairness it will not just be bugs, larger disks are playing a part too, but it is clear that there is a change sweeping through the industry.

Let me explain.

For the last 25 years RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) has been the predominant model for protecting data across a collection of disk drives. Back in 1989 I was product manager for the Compaq SystemPro at Compaq in the UK when we introduced what was debatably the first purpose built industry standard server. It also had one of the first RAID Controllers. It was innovative and it spawned a new class of server.

I just read a lengthy article by Lucas Mearian in Computerworld online entitled “Protocol wars: Can Fibre Channel survive Ethernet's assault?” Of course the debate has been going on for years now so it is not new, but the article prompted me to want to provide my perspective on converged networks.

Let me start by saying that I am of the opinion stated in the article that long term Ethernet wins. However as the article correctly states Fibre Channel is still a growing market (albeit more slowly), and according to Gartner is in $50 Billion of equipment around the world.

IT managers are I am sure interested in the debate but are of course consumed by shorter term concerns than what connectivity they will use in 10 years time. Today’s reality is the total market is represented by a mix of Fibre Channel and Ethernet (principally iSCSI & NAS).

By: Kirill Malkin: Chief Technology Officer - Over the past couple of years the storage networking industry has been going through a quiet revolution. Traditional scale-up storage array designs built on hard disks now approach a petabyte and are being augmented with terabytes of ultra-high performance solid-state tiers or caches. Proprietary single-processor hardware architectures are being replaced with x86-based multi-core number crunchers running at 3 GHz or more each. The dynamic RAM cache capacities have grown by at least a magnitude, now reaching tens and even hundreds of gigabytes.

The “Rule of 7” still applies in today’s internet world of marketing.  It still takes seven times for a product or concept to gain recognition by a customer.  Pre-internet days, vendors would advertise on TV, billboards, magazines, newspaper, industry trade rag, radio, direct mailer.  In today’s internet world, we take to Al Gore’s invention of the internet to decide what to buy, where to buy it, barter online, get educated, validate the solution, listen to feedback, and of course it starts with Google.

1)     Because one platform costs less than three

• The Starboard AC72 consolidates mixed workloads on a SINGLE platform.  The cost of multiple platforms to support different workloads is more than just in the purchase of the hardware.  You have less efficient space utilization, multiple maintenance contracts, more complex networking, bigger power bills, more admins and more expensive admins.

2)     Because shared resources drive utilization and performance up

• If you have three storage platforms for unstructured data, structured data and virtual server workloads it stands to reason that you are not being as efficient as you could with resource utilization.  You are also not using new technology efficiently.  If you want to add SSDs to boost performance you have to add them to each of the systems individually.  The AC72 lets you share SSD resources across workloads enabling you to buy less but get more.

Today is seems like every vendor on the planet has a “unified” storage system.  But what is “unified storage”? 

Hardly a day goes by without one vendor or another “redefining unified storage” so it is pretty hard to tell.  Any vendor with separate SAN and a NAS platforms and a management interface calls themselves unified. Some iSCSI only storage vendors are even calling themselves “unified”.

In 2010 John Webster wrote a piece entitled “Is it unified or un-unified storage” for CNET which still rings true today.  So what is the definition?   According to SearchStorage “Unified storage”, is defined in the following way:-

“Unified storage (sometimes termed network unified storage or NUS) is a storage system that makes it possible to run and manage files and applications from a single device. To this end, a unified storage system consolidates file-based and block-based access in a single storage platform and supports fibre channel SAN, IP-based SAN (iSCSI), and NAS (network attached storage).”

By Lee Johns, VP Product Management, Starboard Storage - was thrilled this week when Starboard Storage got to release that MarineBio is a user of 72TB of the Starboard AC72 Storage System.   MarineBio is a nonprofit volunteer marine conservation and science education group sharing the wonders of the ocean to inspire conservation, education, research, and a sea ethic.

As I traveled to attend my twelfth SNW in Dallas this week and checking emails on my iPad, I was reminded by the great success of the iPad series and how Apple has been innovating one winning product after another.  The stock is north of $600 a share and Apple is worth more than $500 Billion dollars.  Now that’s a lot of innovation, and I’m glad to be an Apple shareholder.

By Lee Johns, VP Product Management - When it comes to storage there is debatably no more important an issue than backup and recovery. Storage vendors go to great lengths to protect the customer’s data. Dual controllers, redundant components, parity based data protection (RAID), mirroring, replication, snapshots, and clones are all methodologies used to help customers insure that there data is protected from failure. With all of that technology protecting the data you might wonder why do you need backups.

By Lee Johns, Vice President Product Management - Everybody is talking about SSD storage today and there are so many new announcements I can see why it is hard for customers to get under the covers and understand what is best for them. On a simple level there are really three types of Solid State storage platform: