Now Let’s Move On And Do Something Useful
Not that it wouldn’t be useful if someone were doing it. It just isn’t happening. Aperi seems to have sunk without a trace, or at least a website, leaving behind just a few news stories. Storage Revolution is only slightly more lively: the last post on the forum was 5 weeks ago; the last technical post was in March.

StorageMojo.com Offers Its Condolences
Aperi and Storage Revolution are both dead. Which isn’t surprising. The difficulty in managing a giant hairball isn’t the management – it’s the hairball. Want to be a leader?

Find A Parade And Get In Front Of It
The parade gathering members right now is the low-cost, commodity-based storage system. Whether it is Google’s GFS, Cnet’s Haystack, do-it-yourself iSCSI arrays or Openomy.com, the signs are clear. Enough technology has filtered down – and enough applications have filtered up – that a new generation of storage is upon us.

What does this new generation look like?
Nothing special. That’s the beauty of it.

  • Commodity drives – usually SATA – and enclosures
  • Ethernet-based, iSCSI or NAS
  • Little or no traditional RAID gack: controllers, NVRAM, dual-porting
  • Mostly or totally done in software
  • High availability, resilient, and much lower cost

These are disruptive technologies. People are creating storage based on them today (the best market research money can’t buy). It is like the mid-80’s when people were just waking up to the power of networking PC’s. Only the opportunity is here now, right in front of us.

Tomorrow: Open Storage Arrays Are Here. w00t!