2008: The Year of Capacity

There is a major change underway in the storage marketplace, as vendors rearrange their wares to tap into growing demand for low-cost, high-capacity storage driven by Web 2.0 and social networking-type applications.

Today, for example, Sun threw down a whopping $1 billion for open-source database vendor MySQL, which is widely used by the likes of Google and Facebook. Service provider Savvis also overhauled its Utility Storage offering today, touting cheaper prices for large capacities of data that are accessed less frequently.

Savvis has added a service called QoS4 to its Utility Storage offering, which is accessed from one of the service provider's 31 data centers via a Fibre Channel or IP connection.

Unlike the service provider's Fibre Channel-based QoS1, 2, and 3 offerings, which come in 50-Gbyte increments, the SATA-based QoS4 is offered in 250-Gbyte increments. Additionally, QoS4 lacks the high levels of RAID protection offered by its predecessors.

"A typical use for a startup Web company is that they could store database log files in QoS1, their database table spaces in QoS3, and their relatively static multimedia files in QoS4," explains PJ Farmer, senior manager for product marketing at Savvis.The vendor won't reveal its pricing structure, confirming only that QoS4 is about half the price of QoS3.

Expect more announcements aimed at fast and cheap capacity requirements, surely a theme for the year underway.

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