Welcome to Cloud Times Storage server technology and trend analysis

HP and Dale buy 3Par to become the focus of the industry

Why do two companies value a storage enterprise that is not big? The reason is that the cloud storage era is coming soon, facing the IT industry almost crazy competition, who do not want to "lose at the starting line." Two of companies are willing to pay big prices for acquisitions, on the one hand to speed up their own cloud storage process, on the other hand, to suppress competitors.

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Cloud storage really has such a large market potential, it is worth the manufacturers so much attention? Let's take a look at recent important events in data center storage.

Apple is about to go into operation at the end of the North Carolina State Maiden Data Center, the main task of which is to assume storage services and related applications. It is well known that Apple has been successful in the last two years from mobile phones to ipad computers, and sales have soared. In addition, Apple's online music library, video library and the increase in the mall, so that its calculation, storage and other applications demand surge. Therefore, the construction of this 500,000 square feet of data centers to meet the needs of users.

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Facebook, the most visited social networking site, has 500 million subscribers worldwide, equivalent to 8% of the world's population. The size of his data center is also quite large, and the storage requirements are high.

Facebook needs a lot of storage infrastructure to hold its huge photo store, with the steady growth of 1 million new photos per day for users. People share more than 30 billion items on Facebook each month. In addition to photos, there are a lot of video, files and other resources need to be stored.

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From the "Star Wars" era, 3D effect rendering gradually entered the field of film and television, the latest "Avatar", "2012" and a variety of 3D cartoons so that people fully feel the charm of 3D special effects. Unlike traditional movies, 3D rendering requires support from a production team and a powerful computer. And today's films are mostly used in high-definition production, 1920 of high resolution to increase the amount of rendering calculation, in order to improve efficiency, it is necessary to increase the server's computing and storage capabilities.

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Recently, Isilon worked with Sony Imageworks to create 3D special effects for several classic films. Including the recent hot "Alice in Wonderland" and "Spider Man" trilogy. Senior Software engineer Nicholas Bali also said: Isilon storage products in the management also ease of use performance is good, can be more convenient for designers to produce realistic results. In the same time, can make more, better special effects and 3D image.

Today, storage devices have been gradually to the miniaturization, Low-power, high-performance aspects of the development, increasing density, late maintenance costs gradually reduced, some enterprises have begun to apply cloud storage.

At present, the application of "cloud storage" in enterprises, mainly in the form of virtualization performance. Indeed, from an application perspective, storage virtualization does make management much easier.

Storage virtualization can be understood as an abstraction of hardware resources, expressed in virtual form. Virtualization separates physical storage systems from data-driven concrete workloads, allowing users to store resources on demand as they wish. Virtualization involves the pooling of multiple physical storage resources into a single virtual storage resource, which can then be centrally managed or partitioned into several virtual machines in a logical manner.

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Storage virtualization also has a number of patterns for different applications to choose from, where a single resource multiple logic can be interpreted as a physical hard disk only one, the user is seen is a virtual out of multiple hard drives, this model is conducive to the decentralized application of hardware resources. The other is a single logical representation of multiple resources, that is, the actual physical hard disk has a lot of presents to the user only one, this way more suitable for the integration of hardware resources management. Others have complex, layered, and more sophisticated modes of expression.

From the current situation, storage virtualization has been widely used by enterprises, and the mainstream server operating system can also be very good support for virtualization software. Virtualization does play an important role in the integrated management of complex hardware resources.

In addition, storage virtualization is also more conducive to Low-carbon energy conservation. The usage of many hardware resources is not 100%, and the amount of power consumed during no-load is considerable. Once there was a case about storage virtualization Energy saving. An enterprise's original 500 servers, the use of virtualization solutions reduced to 50, of course, the server has also done a corresponding upgrade, is to improve a certain storage density. Energy consumption is reduced by 10 times times after using virtualization, but there is no problem with using it, or it can be seen as raising the asset utilization rate by 10 times times.

In addition, there are tiered storage and other ways. The simple understanding is to divide the storage device into different levels. The most powerful storage server consumes more energy and is used to do the work that the front-end uses frequently, without affecting performance. Low disk speed storage Server power consumption, you can put some of the less frequently used files in it, reduce server workload, thereby reducing operating costs.

So, in which direction will future storage go? It is believed that friends who often pay close attention to the industry can say that high-density, low-power hardware and emerging networked storage patterns are necessary to build cloud storage.

The main application mode of traditional storage is connected storage (DAS), which is mainly attached to the server, connecting the storage device directly to a computer through a SCSI interface or Fibre Channel.

But the biggest problem with Das storage mode is that it's not flexible enough. If the servers are geographically dispersed, the direct-attached model can be a major barrier to communication. And some database and server applications must be connected to the storage server. This makes the degree of flexibility greatly reduced.

Network Attached storage (NAS) can solve these problems well. NAS connects storage devices to a group of computers through a standard network topology, such as Ethernet. It has a separate server, similar to a dedicated file server, but this dedicated file server removes most of the original computing capabilities of the common server and only provides file system functionality.

The flexibility of NAS has great advantages over traditional storage modes. They can be placed in workgroups, near the application servers in the data center, or in other locations, connected to the network through physical links. NAS can provide reliable file-level data consolidation because file locking is handled by the device itself.

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In addition to NAS, there are newer storage patterns, such as Sans, that are suitable for more scenarios in applications. Sans are a network-oriented storage structure, most unlike Das and Nas, which is centered on data storage. That is, the storage device is no longer limited to the server system, but rather as a "network disk" on the server node, which, in the view of the server operating system, is like a network disk and a local disk.

Compared with the rich storage mode, the storage media also presents a variety of trends. To Seagate, the West is the head of the physical hard drive camp is still strong, by virtue of cost advantage to carve up the vast majority of market share. Solid-state drives in the development of this year also began to accelerate, various brands of various specifications of products are listed, prices are also declining. At present, Baidu's new data center has been all adopted solid-state hard disk deployment, become the first to leave the mechanical hard drive enterprises. Solid-state hard disk in high-performance and low-power, such as the advantages of quite obvious, in the market performance how to see its cost control ability.

The future of storage products to diversify the direction of development, network storage, high-density, low-power, solid-state drives and so on have become the current "key words", let us look forward to the arrival of cloud storage tide!