Storage - All About Performance & Need

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Interesting and true! The cost of storing a terabyte of data today costs about 1/1000th of what it used to cost just 11 years ago. It wasn't very long ago that everyone measured the cost of storage by dollars-permegabyte. Today it's dollars-per-gigabyte, and there are already some references in India to dollars-per-terabyte as well. We've also gone from data transfer performance measured in KB/sec to MB/sec to GB/sec in the past decade. The next generation age of convergence and converged devices is giving a whole new dimension to storage and continuously challenging laws of physics.

Whether it is the BFSI sector or the ITES segment, Education or Telecom vertical, the need for storage is all the time growing and demanding better results at reduced price points. Every indication points to the promise of continued improvements in the cost and performance of storage, depending on the technology involved. But for the most part, the relative cost of these technologies to each other has, and will remain, fairly constant.

A close look at the storage demands and need and we can classify the requirements into the following - high-end, enterprise-class disk drives, defined as having fast SCSI or Fibre Channel interfaces, occupy the top tier of the pricing structure. These drives are almost always configured in large, complex arrays that provide various levels of data protection, such as RAID-5 mirroring and redundant power supplies. These primarily go into verticals such as Banking and Finance where there is a non-stop demand for resiliency and dependability is of utmost importance.



If we talk about enterprise level storage solutions, quite often CIOs find it difficult to compare the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) between any two storage solutions as it is very complicated, because of a number of variables. For example, the cost of the tape library robotics is spread across the number of tapes slots in the tape library, and this can vary from 7 to over 10,000 slots.

For the past many years, scientists have been forecasting that the next generation of disk drives will reach the theoretical limits of areal density (the number of bits that can be stored on a square inch), however on the other hand, the scientist community have been able to increase the areal density itself, onto the disk and adjust their understanding of physics in the process. It remains a possibility that at some point storage devices will eventually reach their limit, but technological advancements in areas like nanotechnology can provide guidance for further expansion of storage envelope.

On the other hand, there haven't been any predictions about how much information can ultimately be stored on a magnetic tape. Each of the major tape drive and media manufacturers has already proven the science behind at least the next two generations of capacity-doubling product releases, and sees no limits in sight. And tape also has the advantage of being able to add even more capacity by lengthening the tape. This is done by creating substrate materials that are thinner than the previous generation, thereby allowing more tape to be fit into the existing cartridge. The size of a disk package cannot be increased in this manner, so tape engineers have an advantage in the ongoing capacity-increases and cost-cutting wars.

Applications That Drive Storage

In the enterprise universe, it is a common practice to store data from critical business applications such as CRM, ECM, EDM, ERM, ERP, OLTP, RPM, SRM, SCM etc., on high-end disk systems. (And who knew that the software industry had more acronyms than the storage industry?) Files from office applications are typically stored on the more value-priced performance disk systems, while archive data that needs to be readily accessible often goes towards the optical media. Tape has been used for backing up everything that's on disk plus provides disaster recovery ability, and is also used for long-term archival.

Moving forward, disk and tape are likely to coexist with each having its own plus and minuses. And as enterprise segment globally as well as in India, strives towards greater storage need, it is the technological advancement in disk and tape that will define the way storage is implemented and processes evolved.