In the halls of this year's HP Technology Forum conference,
as well as in conference sessions, technical discussions were
focused on what's coming up for HP, as well as for the storage
industry as a whole.During a conference session entitled "Storage Market Trends and
Futures for the 24 x 7 Datacentre," HP chief technologist Hal Woods
gave some hints about what's coming on HP's roadmap, including
primary storage data
deduplication and the future for various networking protocols
and disk drive formats.
Woods said HP is currently working in its research and
development labs on block level single instancing of data on
storage arrays, and predicted moreover that this kind of data
reduction will be common throughout the storage industry by the
2009-2010 time frame. He said one of the challenges will be the
potential conflict between single instancing and encryption, which
he also predicted would become a feature of the storage controller
in the same time frame.
"If done in the incorrect order,
encryption and deduplication can be mutually exclusive
processes," he said. However, "more people are using arrays for
things like backup, and we should see deduplication applied to all
the tiers of storage."
Another direction for HP is the integration of applications with
storage. For example, porting application search engines to the
underlying storage for faster processing.
Potentially, this could lead to a new kind of data warehouse,
according to John Webster, principal analyst at Illuminata. Data
warehouses pull data from its primary storage, transfer it to a
separate application, cleanse the data and put it in a new format
for presentation. "It's a multistep process. If the data mover
could also carry the search engine, you wouldn't need that separate
repository," Webster said.
Disks and wires: The future for the nuts and bolts, according
to HP.
Woods was also bullish about solid-state disk. He predicted that
eventually, solid-state disks could hold metadata, while primary
data resides on spinning disk to speed performance when searching
for data, and cut power and cooling. "The challenge right now is to
find a system you could put in front of it that wouldn't become a
bottleneck," he said.
Historically, Woods said, the introduction of a new disk drive
form factor renders the previous one obsolete within 24-to-36
months, but he predicted disks will buck this trend with the advent
of 2.5-inch form factor, with 3.5 inch remaining the preferred
low-end form factor. "A lot of high-end apps are spindle bound,
like databases, and 100 spindles on the 2.5-inch form factor
consume much less power, which is a concern for the enterprise," he
said. "But why would you care about that on, say, a TiVo? [A] 3.5
inch is still small enough to fit on top of your TV set."
Over the next year, Woods predicted, 8 Gbps Fibre Channel, 10
Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) and the iSER protocol, which provides
direct memory access via Ethernet, as well as the Fibre Channel
over Ethernet (FCoE) protocol, will all come to a head.
According to Woods, iSER shows promise for boosting 10 GigE.
"Ten Gigabit Ethernet isn't enough on its own to push iSCSI to the
forefront of the networking market. It'll take iSER, as well, to
avoid having to do TCP/IP offload."
FCoE also has potential pitfalls, he said. "The spec so far
talks about converging the two networks in a way that could create
ugly corner cases," he said. For example, Fibre Channel and
Ethernet have different ways of dealing with highly congested
networks. The spec must find a middle ground that doesn't cause
increased complexity in the network.