Irreverence

posted on 11 June 2008 05:02

It was just another day in storage-land yesterday, rush hour all day long, the sort of day we are becoming used to. NetApp launched three performance boosting products: its FAS3100 line; its PAM; and its SAA caching appliance. Then Symantec announced its OpenStorage API and FalconStor was the first vendor to announce integration, with its VTL now working much better with Symantec Media Servers. Nirvanix extended its cloud service storage offerings to enterprises with a 100% SLA available.

It emerged that the next Mac OS X version, Snow Leopard, had ZFS support in it; score one for Sun. Western Digital chose the day to announce its Caviar Black 1TB SATA drive, the fastest on the market it says. Neverfail announced a product extension to support Windows Clusters and also Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V. (NetApp announced WS2008 and Hyper-V support too.)

There was a sign that Blu-ray disk manufacturers were gearing up for increased Blu-ray disk sales by ordering machinery at a faster rate than in the equivalent time of DVD expansion eleven years ago. Apart from that there was an interview with a Dell executive revealing the company's plans for flash-enabled servers and flash SSD-enabled EqualLogic PS storage arrays.

There were 15 or so press releases that had to be mentioned plus a WD 'no comment' on the hot topic of a potential 20,000rpm drive, and still more releases were arriving at the close of the day.

The storage world is simply bursting with energy and developments. There is a constant, unceasing backdrop of fast-increasing amounts of data to be stored and a need for apps in servers to access that storage faster or more cheaply, preferably both.

Slowdown and recession may be coming or even here in pockets of the US and European economies; Africa may be continuing to knock on the doors of hell with its handbasket, but the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) are in a sustained phase of growth, in and to first world status, and their appetite for organized IT infrastructures with lots of data to be stored and accessed looks as if it could counter any slowing down in the western economies.

We're on a roll; storage is booming and the development pace is frenetic. What's happening today? Well, there's Panasas and - but that will give the game away. Wait and see....

^{[Chris Mellor.]}

^{Picture credit: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/olympics/torch/2008-04/24/content_6642166.htm}