Comments on: What is “primary” storage?

By: Don MacVittie

Don MacVittie — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:41:29 +0000

Great write-up. I could niggle at some of the detailed “whys”, but since I agree with the whole, that would be a waste of time.

I’ve done the “velcro and motherboard” thing to get a mail server back up quickly from a non-disk hardware failure. Since it “worked”, it stayed that way longer than you’d expect.

Don.

By: Lee Johns

Lee Johns — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 13:28:34 +0000

I agree Robin. The interesting implications of the move from firmware to software for storage have not been fully explored yet. No matter if it is primary, secondary or archive, if it is an application running on industry standard server platforms there will be fundamental shifts in market dynamics.

By: Robert Pearson

Robert Pearson — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 07:49:59 +0000

One Operational Definition of “Primary Storage” is that this is the stored Information that produces 80% of your revenue for the company.
The second part of this definition is, “Which of your stored Information, if you should lose it completely, would put you out of business?”.
Easy to ask, difficult to answer. Involves many egos and turf wars.

The most important step to define the “Primary Storage” question is the attitudinal shift to the Information Centric view from the historic Technology Centric view. Boxen (Technology) are good for egos and turf wars.

I am always torn between making the “boxen” really smart or keeping them really dumb. The “big-brained” people feel the best paradigm is “dumb boxen” and very intelligent edges. That seems to be where we are headed.

The Information Centric Storage view makes the boxen (Technology) disappear by becoming seamless, transparent and invisible.

The Information Centric view is more interested in the ROI/TCO ratio of Managed Units of Information. TCO is easy to get, difficult to get correctly. ROI is difficult to get all the time. I can’t even get people to agree on the Information, which if you lose it, will put you out of business, and the Information that generates 80% of your revenue.

The ROI/TCO ratio is the key parameter in the “Well-being Index”.
The Well-being Index is one possible solution to having an important measure of the Information well-being. Call it anything you like.
An acceptable Well-being Index takes into account ROI/TCO, SLA, Context, Content, Findability, Information High Availability (IHA), Information Integrity (II), which Information, if lost, will put you out of business, which Information generates 80% of revenue and the User Experience (UX).

The “rich” Storage environment seems to be beyond the visible horizon. By “rich” it is meant that if ILM, data de-duplication, in-stream data compression, Content Typing and Records Management, etc. for archives is desired it will be an automatic Lower Metric in the Storage tools.

A much more important Storage consideration is the comment ”Our goal for replication throughput is 1 terabyte per hour”.
1 terabyte per hour is expensive up front. It may be beyond your IT pocketbook. But what part of 1 terabyte can you afford? Do you know? Do you know how to determine this? Do you know what the benefits will be?

That would be a nice rich Storage tool to have. What level of “Speed Limit of the Information Universe” does my IT infrastructure need to support and deliver Findability, User Experience, Information High Availability, Information Integrity, Disaster Recovery, and Business Continuity?

Would it be nice to have the Information Integrity software deliver a “Well-Being Index (Status)” through the “Well-Being API”?

Would it be nice to have the “Well-Being Index” show you visually that ILM was invoked for “xxx”bytes of Information.
That data de-duplication operations were performed on “xxx”bytes of Information?
The Content that was managed by Information Integrity in the last “xxx”hours? And how that Content relates to the IT Portfolio Management, Lines of Business and the company Portfolio Management?

Would it be nice to have a Storage tool with an interface like Ms. Dewey? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ms._Dewey
You just click on the Ms. Dewey-Storage and tell it to show you whatever it is you want to know. Like the Well-Being Index and API, the current Speed Limit of the Information Universe, the SLA status, the current status of Findability, User Experience, Information High Availability, Information Integrity, Disaster Recovery, Business Continuity, etc.
The possibilities are endless…

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 02:50:29 +0000

Yesterday’s “archive” storage is tomorrows “primary” storage for the right apps.

Shouldn’t that be Yesterday’s “Primary” storage is Tomorrow’s “Archive” storage.

ie: FC Disks are for archival storage of the MEMCache Database.

By: Jeff Treuhaft

Jeff Treuhaft — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 21:46:59 +0000

Could not agree more Robin! For a growing majority of IT environments the features of a ‘Primary Class’ platform are much more critical than the device model number or benchmark score in a lab environment. Integrity protections, Data Security, Snapshots, Replication, these are the touchstones of “primary class” storage for most IT people. One of the challenges you raise is that as vendors broaden the ways they deliver devices that can be used by primary the workloads can increase. Multiple stacks running on disparate hardware integrating many drive technologies sounds great but it multiplies the day to day workload of an average IT adminstrator who now has to watch potentially 10s or even 100s of boxes for issues and to protect against data loss. This is why with the right primary class features backed by a true SLA most IT shops can greatly benefit today from the use of enterprise storage services like Zetta. All the primary class features and advanced data protections in an on demand business model without the complexity of trying to figure out how to erect and then maintain a private cloud of storage.