Saturday, June 9, 2012

10 Exabyte Storage System

Cleversafe, a cloud storage software vendor which offers its customers "limitless storage space", says that it has designed a dispersed storage system that exceeds a storage capability of 10 Exabytes (EB), or 1,000 Petabytes (PB).

The system is based on Cleversafe's Portable Datacenter (PD), which integrates 21 storage and network racks that include 189 storage nodes of 45 x 3 TB drives to offer a total storage capacity of 25,515 TB. The current configuration also includes 35 PDs per site (893,025 TB) and 16 sites total (14,288,400 TB with more than 4.7 million drives total). In total, Cleversafe offers about 13.6 EB of storage.
What could you do with so much storage? The best application scenario today may be data mining. Large scale data mining. “Internet traffic volumes are increasing at a rate of 32 percent globally each year. It’s not unrealistic to think companies looking to mine that data would need to effectively analyze 80 EBs of data per month by 2015,” said Russ Kennedy vice president of Product Strategy, Marketing and Customer Solutions for Cleversafe. Kennedy noted that the company's storage solution is a "foundational enabler to Big Data analytics.” The object-based storage could especially be useful in large-data applicatiosn leveraged by governments and defense agencies.
However, Cleversafe noted that the creation of the Exabyte storage model was a result of Federal government and a telecommunications provider inquiring what it would take to achieve a 10 Exabyte storage system. Kennedy noted that, because of these inquiries, the company knows that there is "definitely interest" in such a product.

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

NetApp - Automated Storage Tiering


NetApp has put a lot of time and energy into understanding the problems that AST must address in order to architect an optimal solution.
This article describes:
  • Criteria for evaluating AST technologies
  • Migration-based versus caching-based AST approaches
  • The NetApp® Virtual Storage Tier—a caching-based approach to AST

The FAS6200 series.

Friday, April 6, 2012

Market Share Analysis: Network-Attached Storage/Unified Storage, Worldwide, 2011


  • EMC overtook NetApp in 2011 as the No. 1 vendor in terms of overall vendor-branded revenue for network-attached storage (NAS) and unified storage through internal growth (VNX/VNXe and Data Domain) and acquisition (Isilon).
  • NetApp's Data Ontap maintains its No. 1 ranking for NAS/unified storage in terms of technology platform.
  • The estimated "pure NAS" market (excluding the block storage portion of the unified storage market) grew 21.5% in vendor revenue in 2011, much faster than block-based storage arrays because of the NAS support of growing vertical applications and virtualization.
  • The NAS market has become increasingly consolidated with innovative products and vendors acquired by top-tier storage vendors in the past two years.