Listen to Learn

To gauge the latest trends in storage networking, one has only to glance at recent deployments. Real life is, after all, the best market bellwether.

Take what's going on in Clark County, Nevada. (See Clark County, Nev..) Here's a snapshot of the kind of data overgrowth many organizations face. In Las Vegas, the trend is enhanced by a burgeoning population with massive data processing requirements.

According to Rich Taylor, Clark County's senior systems programmer, there are now around 2 million people residing there, with more flooding in every day. "Conservatively, the population is growing by 4,000 to 5,000 people a month," he says. The 1.3-Tbyte IBM Shark he bought five years ago isn't cutting it as volume presses up against the 100-Tbyte mark.

Newly installed NAS and a server revamp have dramatically reduced Taylor's scaling issues, including cost of disk storage, power consumption, and footprint. In addition, he has local support for his hardware. There's nothing fancy here except the savings.

Another trend, WAN optimization, is illustrated by the case of Mary Kay, the cosmetics company. (See Mary Kay.) Network architect Rob Wieters says he'd barely finished a forklift upgrade of servers, routers, switches, and firewalls in April 2005 when his group learned a big ad campaign would be launched in September. Wieters used a Packeteer appliance to separate campaign from regular business traffic.Again, no frills. No intriguing partnerships or bleeding-edge technologies. Wieters's staff isn't even using WAFS (wide area file services). While public focus may be on Packeteer's purchase of Tacit and Expand's acquisition of DiskSites, the Mary Kay IT folk are just intent on getting QOS to work for them. (See Packeteer Closes on Tacit and Expand Snaps Up DiskSites.)

Indeed, some users are just now getting a SAN. At the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), for instance, director of network services Anne Topp says the nightmare of managing direct-attached storage for hundreds of users ended when her group installed a Compellent SAN. (See World Wildlife Fund.) "Now we have more flexibility. We can take disk space from one server and assign it to another," Topp says.

Pretty basic. But for WWF, like other relatively small enterprises, Fibre Channel has been a revelation, even as marketeers everywhere declare its imminent demise.

The takeaway from all this is as plain as the implementations above. Storage suppliers – and those of us who closely follow their activities – are at risk of gazing too high. While CDP, ILM, 10-Gbit/s Ethernet, and DDR InfiniBand are all intriguing, the real storage trends are those that materialize on the ground, among users themselves.

— Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and SwitchOrganizations mentioned in this article: