storage platforms

the long road to comprehensive archival storage

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for several years, the next crest of storage has always been 3 dimensional holographic media. two companies seemed locked in the struggle to get their technology to market, inphase and optware. both promise a device by this year in the range of 200 GB to 300 GB, and a few deals have been made, but no hardware yet. when only the light moves, and the disc remains mostly steady, challenges can arise.

the first holographic storage system will most likely be over $10,000 and address only the most needy high volume broadcaster or studio. the consumer versions of such devices most like will not see the light of day until 2010. for the rest of us with 500 GB and 750 GB hard drives with archive in mind, we have the foolhardy disk to disk solution, or a very tall stack of DVD or blu-ray discs. more than likely for 2006 and 2007 we’ll still be using LTO2 of LTO3 tapes for the archive, holding either 200 GB or 400 GB per cartridge.

the big gobble the small

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over the last 90 days, the storage world has shifted hands. small innovative companies have been acquired by other competitors, reducing consumer choice. for those asleep at the wheel, here is a quick summary of what’s been going on:

2 may 2006
quantum corporation acquires Advanced Digital Information Corporation (ADIC)

ADIC is the basis for apple mac OS X xsan technology using stornext FX. quantum a few years ago aquired the tape business of seagate technology called certance.

8 march 2006
micron technology buys lexar media
micron, a leader in DRAM, want to be a leader in NAND flash memory.

28 february 2006
avid aquired medea corporation, an innovator in PATA/SATA RAID storage.

21 december 2006
seagate technology buys maxtor

consumers have seagate technology, hitachi global storage technologies, and western digital.

hard drives come from one place

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a week before Christmas is usually a quiet time when companies rev down for the end of the year, but also prepare for next year launches. earlier today in the world of storage, seagate announced they will acquire maxtor. over the last five years, the entire storage arena in the SCSI, SAS, SATA, and PATA has shrunk from many manufacturers to just three major players. in 2001 maxtor acquired the quantum hard drive division. in 2002 IBM hard disk drive division was sold to hitachi. so we have just three major manufacturers of drives: seagate, hitachi, and western digital, with a long shot samsung as a rouge drive maker.

storage has never been cheaper, with some mechanism approaching 25???°¬¨¬®¬¨¬¢ a GB, with normal prices around 50???°¬¨¬®¬¨¬¢ a GB. will pricing and innovation increase, or shunt? 2006 should see the introduction of 1 TB hard drives.

SAN prices dropping

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it’s amazing, but in the next three to six months the cost of storage is going to drop again, especially managed storage. using direct attached PATA or SATA drives is OK for the individual user, but when you get your multiple workgstations online, and the 120 GB storage capacity is all of a sudden 2048 GB, and the data is mission critical, so you require redundancy, recovery, and backup, the puzzle gets more exciting and often times very expensive.

apple answered this management problem with its Xserve RAID and Xsan solutions, but at costs approaching $2.50 a GB, it is quite expensive. i have found SAN products starting around $0.50 and the infrastucture is not fibre channel (FC), but well understood gigabit ethernet (1GbE), so instead of $10,000 on equipment, you can spend $500 and get near similar results (instead of FC protocol you use iSCSI).

these types of topologies are just starting to appear from netgear and dlink, and i’ll be ready for them.

DVD+R

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i suggest the new sony dual format drive. it will burn both DVD+R and DVD-R, the best of both world at 4x on -R and 2.4x on +R. who will win the format war, who cares when you are covered? if FCP or DVDSP does not support the drive directly, get a copy of roxio toast. it supports all formats and drives, and you just export you project to a file, instead of using the drivers directly from FCP or other tools. my bet is the DVD+R/DVD+RW camp is going to win over pioneer. i’ll know more after comdex in vegas. the model is the 500A.