Another View of the Fibre Channel vs. iSCSI Protocol War
Jon Toigo at Enterprise Systems has posted his predictions for storage in 2008. He has an excellent alternative view of the fibre channel vs. iSCSI protocol battle. Despite the fact that I recently panned iSCSI, Jon raises interesting and valid points about fibre channel’s shortcomings, especially in the area of interoperability.
“Unlike FC switches, where standards have been developed to ensure that vendors can make their switches non-interoperable with one another even if they fully comply with the letter of ANSI standards, iSCSI switches (or rather IP switches) will work and play together.”
I, personally, as well as several of my customers, have been bitten by SAN interoperability issues. I’ve even griped on occasion that FC SANs should be as easy to assemble as IP networks. I just hadn’t extended that thought to iSCSI. Thanks, Jon, for opening my eyes to this one.
Interoperability issues aside, I still see fibre channel remaining the dominant storage connection protocol in 2008. Perhaps 2009 will finally be the year of iSCSI.
IDC Issues Top 10 Storage Predictions for 2008
IDC has published its top 10 storage predictions for 2008. Here’s my take.
1. Storage services models for data backup, archiving and replication will be more appealing to businesses.
I agree completely. More and more companies, especially smaller ones, are realizing that it doesn’t make sense for them to constantly be building ever larger storage infrastructures. The concept of a “storage utility” has been bouncing around since at least 2001, but it has only recently started to take off. Services like Amazon’s S3 and the oft-rumored G-drive are only the beginning.
2. New role-based storage systems will demand tighter integration between the storage layer and content-generating applications.
This one also makes sense. In a business context, storage isn’t important. It’s the data contained within the storage that is valuable. Unfortunately, our ability to categorize and contextualize data has not kept up with our ability to generate it. One of the on-going challenges of data management is to separate the valuable data from the background noise. Making the storage layer more aware of the contents of the data is a logical step.
3. Vendors will build object-based storage systems to classify data and add policies closer to the point of creation.
This is an extension of the above. Today many companies faced with data retention regulations adopt a “keep everything” policy. This leads to multiple challenges beyond the obvious cost of storage. By having a mechanism to automatically classify data as it is created, policy can be enforced in an autonomic manner. For example, the storage system will know that my quarter-end financial spreadsheet needs to be kept for some period of time, while my email asking my coworkers where they want to go to lunch can be discarded immediately.
4. Falling prices of solid-state disk drives will push mainstream adoption.
I’m not as optimistic on this point. I think that a lot more solid state storage will be sold in 2008, but I don’t think that 2008 will be known as the year of the solid state drive. I look for it in laptops and blade servers in 2008. The price point is just going to be too high for use in enterprise storage. Perhaps 2009.
5. Virtual servers will become an ideal conduit for iSCSI.
iSCSI has been predicted to take over the storage networking world since 2004. Every year it gets a little better and gains a little more market penetration, but fibre channel still prevails.
Don’t get me wrong, I like iSCSI. I also think that it is a natural fit with the virtual server ecosystem. The challenge is going to be one of speed. 4Gbit fibre channel is common and 8Gbit is just around the corner. Gigabit ethernet is common, but 10Gbit ethernet is still a bit unusual. Once you start stacking a lot of virtual server images onto your hardware, you’re going to start needing that extra bandwidth. I predict that iSCSI will ultimately be king in the smaller shops, but fibre channel will continue to reign in the enterprise.
6. Value-added storage services will become nontethered from storage infrastructure.
I hope this one comes true. I’m tired of vendors deliberately ignoring open storage standards in an effort to protect their install base. Aperi is a step in the right direction.
7. Full-disk encryption will be prevalent in the data center to satisfy compliance and safe harbor provision rules.
This one is a no-brainer. 2007 was the year of tape encryption. 2008 will absolutely be the year for full-disk encryption. The interesting challenge will be managing the encryption keys. That is ultimately much more difficult than scrambling the bits on the disks.
8. Offerings designed for small and midsize businesses featuring integrated storage and server technology will flood the storage market.
This is already happening.
9. Green storage initiatives will cause companies to seek nondisruptive/partial hardware upgrades.
I’m going to be honest. I don’t get this one. Can anyone help clue me in?
10. De-duplication, thin provisioning and virtual tape libraries will be in demand because of power saving efforts in the data center.
Ah, the buzzword trifecta of de-duplication, thin provisioning, and virtual tape. While legitimate arguments can be made for the power savings generated by storing less data, I don’t agree that virtual tape fits here. Think about it. What consumes more electricity, a virtual tape spinning around on a continuously rotating disk or a tape cartridge sitting quietly in a library? Tape isn’t dead. If anything, tape will become more important as an integral part of the green datacenter.
So, that’s my take on IDC’s 2008 storage predictions. Feel free to post your own comments or predictions. I’ll look forward to revisiting this post next December.
(via Computerworld)
Turning the SAN ‘Inside-Out’?
An article on eWeek caught my eye this morning. Seanodes, a Paris-based startup, has announced a product which, as they put it, “allows users to share disks and arrays directly attached to, or embedded in servers as if they were part of an external array.” The idea is that just as you use server virtualization to better utilize excess server processor resources, the Seanodes system will allow you to aggregate and better utilize excess directly attached storage.
In general, I’m not a fan of putting a large amount of storage into a server. Typically, I only use internal hard drives to boot the operating system. I put application data on some sort of centralized storage array. I’ve found that while the acquisition costs of external storage arrays are often higher than using internal storage, the flexibility afforded by decoupling storage from the server is invaluable. Lately, I’ve been experimenting with even moving the boot media off the server.
But let’s go back to the Seanodes Exanodes product. At this point it appears to be supported on Linux only and is aimed at cluster computing. Unlike clustered filesystems like IBM’s GPFS or RedHat’s GFS, which allow multiple computers to access the same files, Exanodes works at the block level. The software aggregates bits of storage from all participating nodes, and provides a synthetic hard drive to a using system. This means that while the hard drives may be shared across multiple systems, the data contained within the synthetic hard drive is not shared. While storage capacity is aggregated and distributed, the data still belongs to a single server. It’s just potentially scattered across several servers.
Seanodes has built availability into the system. Every block of data stored inside of Exanodes is replicated across at least two participating nodes. Seanodes calls this RAIN which expands to “Redundant Array of Independent Nodes”. While this insulates data access from a failed or powered-down node, it also cuts available storage capacity by at least half. The redundancy overhead is even higher if you use RAID arrays as the underlying physical storage.
Seanodes has an interesting concept. I can see a fit for it in the commodity Linux cluster space. I’m unconvinced that it is useful in a more general computing environment. Centralized storage is becoming cheaper by the day and decoupling data from the server is the very heart of virtualization.
(Disclaimer: I am basing my analysis on the information published on Seanodes’ website. I have requested their whitepaper, but have not yet received it.)
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