So in recent months there have been a few newer storage platforms that have been released.  So why the pointed cap?  Because I believe that as we start getting more dense in our storage, more simplified in our management of storage, and move into a virtualized storage pooling model, those archaic behemoth storage systems of the past, which require teams of administrators to manage will begin to fade off into the distance.  I also believe the days of captive storage within traditional servers, and the days of traditional DAS are coming to an end.  This leaves open the door for several established players to release something new, and some new players to release game changing architectures.

     So how do I define a dense storage system?  Large amount of Hard Drives, High Capacity, SMALL form factor.  Why is SMALL capitalized?  Because many vendors can support loads of disk behind a frame-based architecture, however, these hardware architectures can fill up cabinets worth of space. This the is list I came up with in no particular order:

• NEXSAN – SATABeast
• DELL – PS5500E
• Atratro – Velocity1000
• SUN Microsystem – Sun Fire X4500 "Thumper"
• Xiotech – Emprise 5000
• Data Direct Networks – StorageScaler 6000  (thank you for the information Anand)
• ***if you are a vendor or start-up with a dense storage system, let me know and I am happy to add you to the list!

     There are other benefits that these vendors are claiming with these products besides just small form factors and high capacity.  Most are proving to have cooling and power efficiencies as well.  So what  does this mean?  Of course this appeals to the Green initiatives most companies are either looking towards, planning to, or implementing today in the data center.  It has gotten to the point where between blade based server platforms, OS virtualization, and dense storage sub-systems that you could fit a medium sized company’s entire application set within a cooled closet.  Heck, with Citrix and VMware’s VDI we are almost back to what enterprise computing was 20 years ago with Terminals all connected to a mainframe.  I think that would make for a good posting in the future!

     So of these players which are the most intriguing?  I think the Xiotech Emprise and Atrato Velocity have some of the most interesting architectures.  Why?  They are both utilizing a fail-in-place disk failure model.  The idea is that they have enough spares within the system that is can almost be treated as a closed system.  Atrato refers to this as SAID (self-maintaining array of identical disks) and Xiotech refers to this as ISE (Intelligent Storage Element).  The Xiotech Emprise 5000 system with 73GB drives posted a SPC-1 benchmark of 5,892 SPC-1 IOPs™.  While Atrato hasn’t posted formal SPC-1 results yet they publicly post 11,000 IOPs.  Comparing these two results isn’t exactly fair since an IOP will be different with every different benchmark.  Regardless,Atrato is a company to keep an eye on as a Start-Up.