Web 2.0 could usher wave of storage disruption

Computerworld Australia - Trade Me  Ltd., New Zealand's largest Internet auction Web site, has been experimenting with solid-state disk memory technology to improve online I/O performance.

Trade Me is shipping a RAM SAN storage unit from Houston-based Texas Memory Systems Inc. to New Zealand for trials. The company is looking for a storage system for serving thousands of pictures of items for sale on its site. Right now, the site uses traditional disk storage for the task, but it is encountering I/O bottlenecks.

Ash Ashutosh, chief technologist at Hewlett-Packard Co., has dubbed solid-state disk memory the “New DAS,” or a new form of application-specific, direct-attached storage that could develop into new wave of storage technology disruption as Web 2.0 systems proliferate and find their way into corporations.

Ashutosh said many new online companies rely on a single application and DAS, or “new DAS” optimized for a single application, can provide a solution as long as the business remains simple. This “new DAS” could emerge as a whole new storage category, he said.

Web companies can have specific requirements at odds with current storage technologies, he said. Where traditional storage is deep, some companies, like Trade Me, require breadth to serve large volumes of data with a very short life.

However, the advantages of shared storage and scalability could be lost as businesses become more complex and as applications proliferate. Ashutosh foresees new kinds of hybrid environments emerging that combine traditional DAS, solid-state disk, NAS, SAN and other storage architectures.

He said the desired state would be one where applications are “infrastructure-aware” and storage modes can be mixed along with assured quality-of-service management. He said infrastructure management automation could be an extension of the operating system in these service-oriented businesses.

Other developments could coincide with this disruption, such as the use of mix-and-match commoditized components, delivery of software as a service or as a utility, and the convergence of the server, network and storage stacks.

Ashutosh, who leads HP’s development of next-generation data center technologies, said developments such as “lights out” data centers (he prefers the term “lights dim”), where the data center is largely unattended and remotely managed, will move IT more toward this utility model with the ability to pool and create a service across a wire.