Opinion

posted on 15 August 2008 16:49

Omneon was recently cited in a Seagate release about its Barracuda drives being used by NBC for the Olympic Games TV reports. It's a player with credibility in the extremely scalable data storage market. This is what Geoff Stedman, VP of Worldwide Marketing at Omneon, thinks about the IBM XIV  product and its impact on the market:-

"With XIV, IBM is just the latest big player to realize that there is a new type of solution needed to handle today’s storage needs. All data is not created equal and with the increase of web 2.0, telepresence, multimedia, video surveillance and other media intensive applications, the legacy way of doing things is not working. The XIV product mirrors much of what we already do, which is based on nearly ten years of doing business with major broadcasters like Turner."

"For one, XIV is said to not use RAID. At Omneon, we believe RAID is inadequate for highly-scalable storage systems and to avoid the limitations of it, we developed a dynamic data redundancy technique which ensures 100% uptime and does not require lengthy rebuild times when a drive fails. Also, XIV is said to have a scale out architecture. Since we don’t use RAID, and rely on a modular, grid-based approach, customers can plug in any size box and use its full capacity immediately."

"And total system capacity can scale from a few terabytes to multiple petabytes within a single file system. These are just a few of similarities between XIV and what we’ve been doing. IBM’s entry into this market (and the pending Hulk/ Maui products from EMC) validates our belief that not all data is created equal and a new approach is needed to handle today’s media storage demands."

Me, I'd add the HP ExDS9100 and Isilon IQ systems to the mix as well.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}