Industry Watch: The most popular cloud storage technology in today's market

Visible, this problem arises, not only because of the high volume of data, but also other factors such as management, a large number of duplicate data storage, low data utilization, and so on, as the cloud developed over the years, when talking about cloud storage, in short, is to use technology to store resources reasonable, secure, Efficient application to the network to provide business development of a new solution.

Cloud storage has become a concern as cloud computing becomes popular, and unlike cloud computing's "foggy", the problem and bottleneck in data storage, whether it is in the past two years will increase the efficiency of storage management, or the more sensitive to capacity expansion of users, even cost reduction, Cloud storage has a corresponding hot storage technology to provide solutions.

for end users, the storage technology discussed here is when there is a need, the data center must choose the relative technology to perfect the mature scheme, whether the technology is promoted early, or whether the conservative dispute can be really applied to the cloud, let technology lead innovation concept gradually formed. Perhaps this is the basis for the development of "cloud storage" technology, and innovative technologies can gradually become a viable alternative to traditional storage architectures.

In the course of past industry development, increasing storage management efficiency has become a primary problem for many companies, and automated tiered storage becomes the most effective base technology, referring to the ability to migrate blocks of data between different disk types and RAID levels, which can meet the appropriate balance between performance and space use, Quickly put the data in the right place and avoid the so-called hot spots.

has received widespread attention as a technology that moves data between different tiers of storage media, such as FC disks and SATA disks, still relies heavily on manual or semi-automatic processes. According to the survey, 54% of users migrate data either by hand or partially automated, which is a tedious amount of labor, especially when the nuances of the product include: different granularity of migration of data between tiers, degree of automation, and differences in user-definable policies.

For example, as early as 09, EMC launched fast (fully automated tiered storage) technology to support high-end Symmetrixv-max, midrange clariion, and Celerranas storage systems. Symmetrix supports the move of blocks of less than 1MB, CLARiiON supports a block size of 1GB, while Celerra systems implement data layering movement at the file level. From the performance of product application technology is not difficult to see, for the size of the data block to achieve fast technology.

Although automated tiered storage is in the development phase, it becomes a basic requirement by automating the streamlining of configuration technologies, especially for server virtualization environments. You can see that the automatic tiered storage technology is not the same as the market demand for data changes, and it becomes a universal requirement.

In a rapidly expanding market environment of cloud computing, the rampant growth of unstructured data exposes the limitations of traditional NAS systems, and Nas, with scale-out capabilities, is more attractive to businesses in capacity and performance scalability to cope with the need for large amounts of unstructured data storage, Because the use of horizontal scaling will affectAfter vertical expansion of the procurement. 64% of businesses say they will replace some longitudinal (scale-up) systems with a horizontal (Scale-out) extension system.

Scale-out NAS features, a modular structure, very fast configuration, and even a few terabytes of large files, change management is simple. Scale-out NAS through the global namespace, can realize the flexible management of the system, manage a cluster storage system with 100 nodes and manage a storage system with only two nodes as simple. For scalable clustered NAS systems, the entire cluster can be managed as a single logical system, regardless of the size of the cluster.

Typically, scale-out NAS can begin deployment from the lowest configuration of two nodes. As user requirements for capacity and performance are scaled up, Scale-out NAS enables simultaneous expansion of storage capacity and disk drives. This means that the user can implement on-demand configuration, thereby reducing the cost of the initial purchase.

In addition, growing data is the biggest driver of horizontal storage application growth. According to market statistics, about 54% per cent of the users said that their enterprise data had increased the use of a more horizontal storage structure, while 1/3 of the program participants indicated that the architecture would be adopted in advance. Other considerations, such as performance, scalability, increased demand for hardware utilization, and lower operating costs, are considered by current users as driving forces for scale-out storage platform applications.

with the rise of cluster NAS vendors represented by the EMC takeover of Isilon, the benefits of NAS Scale-out (scaleout) are a relish for industry users. The Scale-out architecture is cheaper in terms of infrastructure cost and operational costs than the traditional storage vertical expansion (scaleup) approach. To put it simply, scaling the architecture horizontally leads to higher operational efficiencies. As you can see in

, scale-out cluster NAS will be one of the storage hotspot technologies that cannot be overlooked in the 2011.

Cloud Computing is also an unavoidable topic for chip giants Intel, and in the storage arena, it's about how to deal with "cloud storage" in Intel's eyes in terms of its products, technology and innovative applications to better integrate the industry's trends.

Next-generation raid and SAS technology based on the IA architecture, which integrates raid acceleration in the processor chip on the next generation of Intel server platform ROMLEY-EP, including SANDYBRIDGE-EP server processors and Patsburg chipsets , the SAS interface is integrated on the Patsburg chipset with SAS capability to support 8-port SAS connections and can be configured to two X4 ports.