Nibble:- The Changing Map of the New Storage Frontier

" I don't think we're in Kansas anymore, Toto" - from the movie - Wizard of Oz

Today's system managers would be forgiven for thinking that their predecessors had a much easier time managing storage.

In the 1980's the choices were simple. You only had two types of mass storage to worry about:- disk drives and tape. You ran software on the disks, and backed everything up onto tape. Mainframe managers backed up their systems overnight, Unix systems administrators backed up their networks on Friday afternoons.

That was it. Nice and simple.

In the late 1980's optical disks entered the computer scene. Write Only Read Many times (WORM) drives could be used to archive critical data for people who worried that their tape media might not last more than 10 to 20 years. And Sun was the first Unix company to switch from tape to CD-ROM as the media for distributing software. That meant we all bought CD-ROM drives, but things were still simple (relatively).

High capacity hard drives (200M) were still expensive in those days, so things got a little bit more complicated when Sun introduced the Sun-3 (68020 based) diskless node workstations. These saved money by loading porgrams and data from the ethernet. But that idea quickly faded away, as drives became cheaper, and faster workstations couldn't wait to get data off the network. It was a good marketing ploy though because it made Sun's entry level workstations look cheaper than their rival HP.

During most of the 1990's systems managers simply had to shuffle around the concepts of three types of mass storage:- hard disks (sometimes bundled in RAID), tape drives (sometimes bundled in libraries) and CD-ROMs (sometimes bundled in jukeboxes). The differences in capacity, performance, and cost of this storage trinity were well understood, and the scope for overlap was minimal.

Nowadays things are a lot more complicated...

Not only has a new type of mass storage device - the internet, been added to the list, but everything has gotten faster and comes with more connection and intelligence options. R/W optical drives have got fast enough to compete with tape. Some vendors are now offering disk to disk backup. Jukeboxes have inbuilt disk drives to cache the data. RAID systems can back themselves up onto tape without requiring any server intervention. The storage can work with all your computer operating systems. And any of the storage systems can be placed almost anywhere...

Should you buy hybrid storage systems which integrate several functions? Or single function systems which are tied together by your own SAN software?

When there are so many viable looking combinations, it's no wonder that things are confusing. Which will be winners? And which, like the Sun-3 diskless nodes of the 1980's, will be consigned to computer history as architectural dead-ends?

I hope that's why you'll continue reading STORAGEsearch, as with the help of our hundreds of contributing information partners we continue to explore the new storage frontier and see how the new territories get mapped into their own recognisable states.

The destination may not be Kansas, and the path may not be as simple as following the yellow brick road. But we'll try and help you find it.