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News Release from: Storage Expo | Subject: Storage Expo 2007
Edited by the Manufacturingtalk Editorial
Team on 06 June 2007
Is clustered storage the way forward?
Clustered storage will break the NAS and SAN stranglehold by Philip Crocker, Director of EMEA Marketing, Isilon Systems
The rise of large unstructured data files is unstoppable From high definition video on demand, to clinical data for medical research, many organisations are increasingly forced to work with data capacities that are reaching into the realm of Petabytes
This article was originally published on Manufacturingtalk on 17 May 2007 at 8.00am (UK)
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Both SAN and NAS technologies are widely established but were never designed to deal with terabyte sized files or high throughput access requirements that are emerging in the unstructured data market.
The comparatively simple storage requirement of enterprise applications such as Microsoft Exchange, SAP and Oracle are much more the preserve of these technologies.
Clustered storage in contrast was designed from the ground up to deal with large files and capacities that scale into the Petabyte range and beyond.
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However, size is not the only factor, the overriding issue is the same as it has always been, namely cost.
Under the NAS and SAN ideology, the bigger it gets the more costly it is to implement, manage and fix in the event of the inevitable problems and there will always be problems! Hard disks fail, switches falter, data gets corrupted, irrespective of vendor, these issues happen and incur substantial costs.
Clustered storage has evolved from the clustered server space where instead of a massive mainframe processing all the application traffic, hundreds and in the case of advocates like Google - thousands of servers share the workload of requests, processes and delivery.
Failures still happen but with clustering, the rest of the working servers just keep on ticking.
In a clustered storage environment, each node is independent and intelligent.
No one node stores all the file data and each cluster has copies or parity bits to allow it to reassemble any file in the event of the loss of any individual disk, node or for ultra secure systems - several nodes.
Nodes connect together like individual bricks in a wall, scaling from tens to thousands of terabytes.
However, lets not get carried away, clustered storage is not the magic bullet for everything.
For database access, email servers and ERP systems, traditional SAN or NAS storage is a better option.
For small data capacities under 2 terabytes, the upfront cost of clustered storage is probably slightly more expensive, not reaching its full potential until you get into the 10-15 TB region.
These truisms may change over the next few years as a number of hybrid solutions currently only at the drawing board reach the market - but these are still someway off.
Clustered storage is also new technology and although it has some heavy weight customer such as Kodak EasyShare, Pratt and Witney and MySpace.com, like any 'new kid on the block', it has to have been around a while for certain more conservative customers to take the plunge...but the water is looking increasingly inviting.
It's still early days for clustered storage but the take up has so far been phenomenal and the need within the market is growing even faster, for many industry watchers, it's not a case of if clustered storage will eclipse NAS and SAN - its simply a case of when!.
Isilon Systems UK is exhibiting at Storage Expo 2007, the UK's largest and most important event dedicated to data storage.
Now in its 7th year, the show features a comprehensive free education programme, and over 100 exhibitors at Olympia, London from 17-18th October 2007.
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