Storage--Virtual And Otherwise.

by Mark Ferelli and Hal Glatzer

MARK: At IDG's Storage Forum I heard Paul Massiglia, of VERITAS Software, say that the IT industry needs a new class of employee called "storage administrator."

HAL: Is that a new name for "chief storage officer?"

MARK: Ahh, you remember! We were writing about that years ago.

HAL: So what's different now? What will an "administrator" do now that an "officer" couldn't do back then?

MARK: Probably only take home less money. You know what IT budgets are like nowadays.

HAL: Is anybody actually hiring "storage administrators?"

MARK: Well, the level of complexity in storage is higher now than it used to be, so it's possible that companies may actually create such a position and get somebody into it.

HAL: I don't know. I've heard there's a shortfall in the number of qualified people to fill IT positions across the board. That's why there's been so much interest in outsourcing to storage service providers.

MARK: People are either going in that direction, or they're looking for ways to make their workload easier--and that will take improvements in software.

HAL: Which takes us back to Mr. Massiglia. Did he speak to that issue too?

MARK: Not so much about ease-of-use, but about "storage virtualization"...

HAL: One of the great new buzzwords of the last six months!

MARK: What we have to look at is the macro issue of storage management. There's a build-or-buy choice out there. Either you develop the expertise in house or you outsource. That's why there are "managed storage" providers and "storage service" providers.

HAL: And the difference is...?

MARK: An SSP is a company like Storage Networks, which has only the hardware on their side of the firewall. The managed service providers are companies like MSI or Storability, where the software and hardware both stay on the client's side of the firewall.

HAL: What else did you pick up at IDG's shindig?

MARK: Lots of interest in storage virtualization.

HAL: Look out! The buzzwords are swarming again.

MARK: Also lots of interest in I/O issues regarding Fibre Channel and SCSI developments, and the implications they'll have on SAN and NAS architectures.

HAL: Was there any talk about IBM's ruthenium breakthrough?

MARK: There was some table-talk at lunch, but I didn't get to the HDD presentation. Both of us should have gone there to cover the conference; so I wouldn't have had to choose between concurrent sessions. But about ruthenium, I'm still trying to deal with the concept of "pixie dust" outside of Peter Pan.

HAL: We should explain, in case our readers missed the news: that "pixie dust" is what IBM researchers are calling their latest magnetic disk breakthrough. They've found that by squeezing a layer of the element ruthenium--a layer that's only three atoms thick--between two layers of magnetic recording material on a platter, they can overcome the superparamagnetic effect--

MARK: What was that you said about swarming buzzwords?

HAL: The bottom line is: IBM claims it can get ten times more bits onto a platter.

MARK: Did they quote an areal density figure?

HAL: Yes, but it's what they achieved in the lab. I expect that they'll get a genuine improvement in capacity when they actually build drives with pixie-dust in the platters, but it may or may not be a full tenfold improvement. Still, the idea is apparently sound: it came to them because ruthenium is already used in HDD read/write heads.

MARK: Ruthenium is a precious metal, like platinum. But if that layer is only three atoms thick, the machinery for laying it down probably costs more than a year's supply of the element itself.

HAL: At least they're not competing with jewelers: gold and platinum are already high-tech components.

MARK: Jewelers get better margins on their sales than HDD vendors do.

HAL: Were there any intriguing predictions from the IDG analysts?

MARK: I heard generally good news from the tape side: tape automation is showing a combined annual growth rate of about 16 percent per year. And there's a rising consciousness about DDS.

HAL: "Consciousness" isn't "sales."

MARK: True, but DDS users like it and they want more from the format, even though it's supposedly in decline; and even though the developer--that's Sony--has said there won't be a next-generation "DDS-5."

HAL: So what will those users do? Migrate up to LTO or DLT?

MARK: Those are high-end formats. It's the middle-ground that'll open up to users looking for an upgrade. As DDS shipments fall, I expect there'll be a feeding-frenzy among the formats. VXA from Ecrix, SLR from Tandberg Data, and AIT-1 from Sony, seem to me to be the leading competitors.

HAL: What about the entry level? If DDS fades away, what will single-users and small-office systems use for backup?

MARK: Direct-attached tape products are in severe decline; I think they're going away permanently.

HAL: Because most tape products are intended to be network-attached now.

MARK: Right. We've heard nothing lately from the Travan people, and theirs is a direct-attach strategy. But they have only a small fraction of the total tape market.

HAL: Did you come away from the tape session with any strong conviction?

MARK: Yes: that in spite of the pressures on tape technology from magnetic and optical disks, tape has exceptional staying-power.

HAL: It has certainly established itself in the backup-and-restore market, where it used to be good only because it was cheap. Now it's not only cheap but reliable.

MARK: As an offline storage technology, it's not likely to be seriously eclipsed any time soon. If our readers agree, let me know by sending me email to [e-mail].

HAL: I can't argue with you on that score, but I'd like to know if any of our readers feel differently. If you think tape is overrated, let me hear from you at [e-mail].