Storage World 2006

I was at Storage World this week in Long Beach. Not a very large conference, this one had most of the up and comers in the storage world. They had 3 keynote speakers, but the most interesting one was the analyst who spoke about, among other things, the "Terabyte home". 8 years ago my company had a 400GB file server in San Jose. (We are about 1000 times that today. I even have an Infrant NAS appliance with over a TB of usable data at home just to store my personal crap. Largest drives today are about 750GB. We are right around the corner from a TB (1024GB) on a single hard drive. Well over 25% of the audience raised their hands when asked how many thought they had over 1TB of data at home - photos, videos, music, etc. I think the next big home utility will be the consumer Google search appliance for the less organized amongst us! ;)

Some of the interesting exhibits included a hybrid laptop disk from Seagate - part regular disk drive, and part flash memory. This preserves battery life on laptops, and actually is able to cache some portion of the OS here too. Windows Vista will probably require these hybrid drives eventually. Riverbed seemed to have an interesting device as well - they provide a device that enables wide area network acceleration, effectively bringing remote offices closer to home. Citibank's taking them public soon. This should be an interesting IPO.

It appears that ILM (Information Lifecycle Management) long hyped by the storage industry about 4 years ago might finally be here - with automated migration between different tiers of storage based on policies and last-accessed times. Companies like Neopath Networks and Acopia have carved out a niche for themselves, creating a new level for themselves in between file servers and clients - the "Virtualization Layer". Sigh. Storage used to be so simple. Besides virtualization, there's a plethora of security & encryption products, data classification and categorization products (e.g. Kazeon), and now disk-based backup devices by companies like Data Domain and Avamar.