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May 12, 2008
Making Web 2.0 File Storage Cheap and Easy
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We have seen a proliferation of cloud computing services over the past year, but only very recently have we seen a major effort from blue-chip vendors to supply the hardware that serves as the foundations for these sites and services. The same holds true for storage in the cloud: Services have been popping up with increasing frequency, but who is looking out for the companies trying to provide these services? With its newly announced StorageWorks 9100 Extreme Data Storage System (ExDS9100), one answer to this question is HP.
According to Patrick Eitenbichler, director of marketing for HP StorageWorks, ExDS9100 targets anyone offering Web 2.0-style services and needing petabyte-scale file storage. Photo sharing, social networking, streaming video and IPTV are just a few ideal use cases. In addition, says Eitenbichler, ExDS9100 is well-suited for the security and surveillance, energy exploration, genome research, and medical imaging markets. Some police departments, he noted, are looking into installing cameras on various parts of officers’ uniforms to verify situational accounts and to improve efficiency by reducing the need for report writing, and this type of storage solution would allow for easy storage of all those files.
Regardless the use, Eitenbichler says the ExDS9100 system is a stepping stone into the future of file storage, especially for the Web, and differentiates itself on three fronts: scalability, manageability and affordability. Nobody, he claims, can touch HP when it comes to offering all of these characteristics in one integrated solution.
Scalability
Starting at 250TB and scaling to 820TB in a single chassis, the ExDS9100 is no slouch when it comes to sheer storage capacity. “It’s big,” summed up Mark Peters, an analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group.
This is a big deal to businesses that are seeing the amounts of file-based storage increasing by leaps and bounds, says Eitenbichler. He cites as an example the HP-owned photo site Snapfish, which currently is managing 6PB (petabytes) of storage and will be at 15PB by the end of next year.
HP has spoken with roughly 50 other customers expressing similar needs, said Eitenbichler, including a financial firm looking to increase its competitive advantage by offering Web users seven years worth of investment history versus its current one-year history. This process, he says, will require petabytes of additional storage.
Peters also has seen this type of demand across the board, and cites Google and Facebook as examples of Web companies that actually had to build their own infrastructures because they couldn’t buy the necessary components anywhere. Now, he said, it’s not just the Googles of the world trying to take advantage of Web 2.0 applications, but pretty much anyone trying to have a modern, fully functional site -- Web companies and regular businesses alike.
“I’ve been in the storage business now for over 20 years, and no one’s ever come out with something that was too big for someone to use,” he said. “Assuming the price is right.”
This kind of exponential growth is mirrored in overall storages statistics, which Eitenbichler says show storage rates doubling every 18 months. File storage rates, he says, are doubling at least once a year, and file storage will account for three times as much total capacity as block storage by 2011. “There’s no end in sight, at least as far as we can see,” says Eitenbichler.
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