Saturday, August 18, 2012

Grid-based Storage

When I introduced the Storage Evolution, I shared some topics I talk about when meeting with a customer: Virtualization, Deduplication, Grid and Encryption. That list has grown to include Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), Convergence, Business Continuity, Clouds and Big Data. It’s about time I start writing about more of these.

The world of storage is changing – fast. When I started consulting, I used to install clusters and super-computers. My specialty was IBM’s SP super computer (like Deep Blue the one that played the Russian chess champion Garry Kasparov). My wife asked if they wore capes.

The super computer market fell apart over a decade ago to grid-based systems. What used to cost millions of dollars was swept away by inexpensive commodity Intel-based servers, usually running Linux and grid software. The market changed and super computers started to become extinct. What used to be a scale-up model became a modular massively-parallel model which became a highly distributed model. The market changed.