Storage Visions – workflow not just hardware anymore
January 6, 2012 – The constantly evolving world of storage that is discussed at the annual Storage Visions event held adjacent to CES in Las Vegas, has completed its transition from being a hardware centric conference to focusing on applicability of the storage solutions. Historically, the challenges in storage have been capacity and reliability. It was followed secondarily by trhoughput and backup methods.
This years conference focused on the new drivers for storage which is content and access. As content increases in size, and the storage and retreival requirements become faster and shorter, the focus is on workflow and new architectures for the hardware, not the individual units of the storage system. Topics such as security, access and replication workflows, long term and short term storage, migration to the cloud, high capacity, software management, storage for mobile devices, and archiving were the themes for the show.
As tape has now moved to an LTFS file system that allows it to be addressed like standard storage, and SSDs have moved up in capacity and reliability to be part of main tiers, the taks is now how to best use these tiers, rather than how do we get them working. The task of media and content creation was a repeated idea. The morning keynote focused on the new SuperHD ot 8K tv standards and recent transmission of the signals at the Olympics in 2012. The challenge for the storage community on this content is the large size (33M pixels x 16 bit data x 120 fps = 63Gbps throughput and TB storage in minutes). Both a problem for storage and for retrieval for being worked on, the format will require new software, applications, tiers and workflows.
The event also focused on the new platform for capture – the mobile device. With the high resolution imagers and high performance audio making in roads to phones, tablets and ultrabooks, these device have a severe power constraint and a voracious need for local storage prior to off load. Getting these devices to use a simple UI and automated control for the management of the capture and for content playback is now pushing new requirments to the storage subsystem. Traditional eMMC and other embedded memory formats were not targeted towards 32GB+ local data storage.
These high capacity applications are driving the creation of new controllers. Although the interfaces are at a current technological plateau (12G SAS, 6G SATA, PCIe Gen3, Infinband, etc) the need to manage these interfaces on the 1000’s of drives at a time, or as a Direct Attached RAID configuration is growing. Solutions to support this space is a growing market, outside of the tech push for new silicon to connect to the drive.
The well attended event, has now full transitioned to systems, IT, and software solutions that utilize the HDDs from the 3 remaining suppliers and from the SSD controllers from the under a dozen suppliers rather than having the component suppliers present their product offering. The new voice of storage is Dot Hill, HDS, Aberdeen, NHK, Linux Works, Kroll, HP, Dell, Fusion I0, EMC, Turner Broadcast, Fox, Shutterfly, Oracle, Qualcomm, IDC, Cleversafe, Aspera, Google, Amplidata, Skyera and Smart Storage joining the traditional speakers of Samsung, Toshiba, LSI, Intel, Quantum, IBM, Seagate, WD, and Marvell.
