Storage Expo

Yesterday, Elizabeth, Heather and myself headed down to Storage Expo in London to have a look around, and see what's hot in the land of storage.

First impressions entering the expo hall were of lots of rather nice looking hardware, from all the usual culprits, and many more besides. Then it was off to the Keynote Theatre for a talk on cloud based storage by Simone Brunozzi of Amazon Web Services. Rather sadly (for me at least), this was more an introduction to Amazon S3 rather than cloud storage in general, but at least it gave time for the coffee to kick in before hitting the stands for the first time.

De-duplication and single instancing seemed to be the buzzwords that really stood out here, with the likes of Symantec claiming you could "stop buying storage". This was reflected in the "future of storage" panel discussion at the end of the day, although I was pleasantly surprised to find acceptance among the panellists that it wasn't a silver bullet. Most of the emphasis here is really on backup and archiving, rather than primary storage, sensibly enough.

Interestingly, I couldn't help but feel that a lot of the vendors there didn't really have their hearts (and in some cases) minds in it - very few seemed genuinely excited about their products, and many of the reps I spoke to didn't seem to know the first thing about them even! One particularly bad sales pitch went somewhere along the lines of:

Rob: "So, what do you do?"
Rep: "We backup stuff, on to an appliance, so it's more secure"
Rob: "Why is an appliance necessarily more secure, then?"
Rep: "Well, it's got like passwords, and access control lists, and stuff, and it's really easy to use, so it's more secure..."

Whilst I'm not arguing that having ACLs, passwords, and being easy to use aren't good things for a backup device, it just wasn't...well... very convincing :-).

That said, there were a couple of guys who really good - 3par, for instance, managed to answer my question of "explain in words of one syllable why I want storage virtualisation" clearly, concisely, and without any Marketing Speak. Thank you!

Then of course there were those who went for form over function - and with a cocktail bar, who can argue? :-).

Back to the more serious bits, though...

The future of storage panel generally agreed that tiered storage was going to become more and more necessary - and interestingly driven somewhat by SSDs, since suddenly it just isn't feasible to replace your entire disk layer with the fastest drives possible as has been the trend in the past. A new "Tier 0", if you like. I think there's a lot of value in this, and it's where products like Exchange Server Archiver (shameless plug) can really help out.

Another refreshing thought was the suggestion that storage in the cloud wasn't the answer to everything, but more likely, a part of a hybrid storage system where different systems are used for the jobs they're best suited to. As one of the guys pointed out, it's all very well incrementally backing up a few GB of changes each night, but if you need to restore in an emergency, how long is it going to take you to pull the whole set back down from the cloud over your 10Mbps Internet pipe?

Oh, and yes, a private cloud is what we all used to call a datacenter! You just might be able to charge for it in a different way...

Last but not least, Best Swag of the Day has to go to PineApp, who were giving away... pineapples! Mmm, tasty. Ours made it back to the office in one piece, and is now sitting on the desk awaiting consumption.