Store this ten years

The author of this article: Wax Gourd Head (Zhang Dong), "Dahua storage" and "Dahua Storage 2" author, dostor storage Forum moderator, author blog address: http://space.doit.com.cn/35700. Contact qq&email:122567712@qq.com

1, storage this decade

In the blink of an eye, as a storage product design planning work has been more than a year, the development of the storage system has some feelings. In the 2002~2009 7 years, it should be said that the storage industry in China to take root in the period, when there are many engineers active in various technical forums, discuss the basic principles of storage systems, deployment configuration. I remember that time, IBM came from Lsioem FASTT series of storage systems are widely used in the country, the technical forum is basically about this series of storage system discussions. The discussion of high-end storage is largely focused on the IBM Shark series, when the domestic focus and discussion of products from professional storage companies such as EMC and HDS were significantly less than IBM's, in part because IBM's storage was heavily bundled with its servers, and EMC and HDS were the only storage products of the two companies. Then it is FASTT's replacement products DS4000 series, and then is DS5000, the generations of products are OEM from LSI, in essence, is a hardware specification of the process of continuous improvement. However, the storage industry is like a person's growth process, the first to have a long body, but the body long to a certain stage, it takes a long mind. With the diversification of the top business, the underlying storage is not just a box that provides data storage, it needs some flexible and easy-to-use data management capabilities to enrich its value, such as snapshot cloning, expansion replication, compression deletion, hyper-recovery, and virtualization.

In China, the level of storage practitioners is also increasing. From this 10-year period of several well-known domestic storage forum discussion topics can be seen, from the original, also discussed the so-called SAN, FC, optical fiber These three concepts and differences in the stage, until later discussed the manufacturers of high-end storage devices in the internal architecture and a variety of data management characteristics of the principle, implementation, Value and application scenarios, and then further, discuss the storage System selection, deployment and planning management. I believe that with the domestic industry on the continuous recognition of storage and accumulation, the first is the manufacturers and integrators, and then will be end customers, with the level of employees, end customers more and more difficult to cheat, this will form a more professional atmosphere and promote domestic manufacturers to continuously independent research and development of the driving force.

Ten years, the change of the fine storage manufacturer. IBM's early takeover of XIV in 2008, and its positioning at the high-end storage level, caused a big stir, a landmark event that not only symbolized the collapse of the closed architecture of traditional high-end storage, but also caused a scale-out heat. Next, EMC has migrated core software from the traditional high-end Symmetrix DMX series that has been in operation for years to the open hardware platform, launching a new generation of scale-out high-end storage-system Symmetrix V-max; The traditional high-end storage USP V is also migrated to the open hardware platform, transformed into a VSP storage system, also declared as a scale-out architecture, but VSP is not very open, in Form I think is still a traditional high-end closed architecture, but the CPU from PowerPC into Intel x86 , while retaining ASIC chips, the appearance of the use of large backplane, CPU, memory, IO board separate hot plug, these are still traditional high-end storage system elements.

In 2011, EMC used its Celerra products as the nose, back-end hook CLARiiON storage, packaged into the Vnx series, and of course the hardware platform was upgraded. There is nothing inherently innovative about this product. But it also launched a low-end Vnxe series, this product appears to be low-end, in fact, hidden mystery. In the author of this March article "Vnxe will bring disruptive changes to the storage System" in the detailed analysis of the vnxe interior and to make inferences, storage + virtual machine is the hundred Change Kong. Storage + computing, that is, application storage is likely to be the direction of future external storage systems. Sure enough, at the VMware World Conference in September, EMC expressed this view without a word, storage directly running virtual machines, directly combined with applications, to preempt part of the server market. In the application of storage this aspect of a domestic software company is quite forward-looking.

In 2010, IBM stacked multiple modules of its multiple products to form a storwize V7000 midrange storage product, which could be said to be the first midrange storage system in IBM's real self research. EMC, after a Symmetrix V-max change, has ended its CX series in the midrange storage System product line, with the VNX series, which is actually a version of the CX-series upgraded hardware plus the Celerra NAS head combination of a so-called scale-out unified storage.

This month, HP also successfully upgraded the acquired 3PAR storage hardware and packaged it as a P10000 product model.

When it comes to unified storage, you have to say NetApp. As EMC's number one competitor (the giant of the storage world's three professional focus stores is EMC, NetApp, HDS), NetApp is an established storage company that was founded in the 90 by independent NAS (replacing the then Linux Server for NFS sharing), At the beginning of this century by the virtual block space on the file system to support block-level access, and packaged as the "unified Storage" concept, widely sought after by the industry, the concept of unified storage until now has not been annealed. NetApp occupies the position of the NAS market leader with its powerful value-added capabilities and easy configuration. From the earliest FAS270, FAS980, to later FAS2000, FAS3000 and FAS6000, to later FAS3100, until recently FAS3200 and Fas6200,netapp migrated smoothly on the hardware platform, There is not much movement in form (except for the recent FASX200 series platform support IO expansion cabinet). NetApp's core competency is its software, which doesn't make any sense if it doesn't have the energy to figure out more than 10 hardware box shapes like a company. Starting with its Ontap7.0 operating system, the Flexvols feature is supported, which is the first prototype of the thin technology for the storage industry (author: Wax Gourd Head (Zhang Dong), "Dahua storage" and "Liar Store 2"), but the word thin seems to be not a netapp generalization. Its core layer of WAFL file system is a very powerful role, known as "The Last word in filesystem" ZFS is borrowed from the idea of WAFL and improved in many aspects of the file system, as well as variant btrfs.

There's another big thing in the 2008 storage world, the author of this article, a landmark of the book "Dahua Storage-Network Storage System principles of fine solutions and Best Practices" published, it is the first storage system basic concepts and principles of a clear and thorough description of the storage books, in the industry has aroused wide acclaim, Let countless beginners quickly into the door, for the domestic storage industry quickly hatching a large number of storage potential talent. Two years later, "Big talk Store 2" was also published successfully, Dahua 2 thickness of more than 900 pages, it can be said that the storage industry has never been a masterpiece, its content involves all aspects of storage technology, even in the domestic academic community has been highly appraised, and successfully entered the major institutions of the professional curriculum teaching materials system, It has also become a prerequisite for major domestic integrators as well as storage vendors, and is well received by many Silicon Valley memory professionals.

Yet the seemingly booming storage market is likely to be a harsh winter.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)