I’ve been poking around the Interwebs, and I’ve noticed that I don’t see the terms ILM or Data Lifecycle Management mentioned much anymore. Odd that we have this many regulatory pressures and the one thing that could actually save us some money, time and stress when dealing with those pressures hasn’t been seen in headlines for at least a year–edging in on two.

Where did it go? Did it just morph into something else? Based on the coverage it was getting two years ago, one would think we would have progressed to hardware-based products supporting ILM initiatives by now.

The storage hardware vendors, with the most noticeable exception being Compellent, still haven’t added ILM features to their hardware. The software vendors out there like Veritas, Tivoli, Commvault, et al, still have them on offer for their suites, but today it’s de-dupe that has the spotlight, and I’m not so sure I see the reason why.

I understand what the marketing is behind de-dupe: “hard economic times are ahead, so save money and don’t buy as much disk,” but if you look at the sales figures from the leading storage vendors they are all meeting their sales estimates, and in some cases exceeding those estimates by a good margin, so businesses apparently haven’t yet gotten into the whole “save money” or the “buy less” aspect of that marketing push.

Manging one’s data would seem to me like the better way to spend, if you know when to move it to cheap disk, commodity tape and through to destruction. It would free up capacity on fast expensive disk, and reduce the effort needed to satisfy policy pressures. I distinctly remember eons ago sitting in a conference hall and listening to Curtis Preston for the first time, and this topic was the thrust of his talk: manage your data, figure out where it should live and put it there.  

Fast forward to today, it holds true now more than ever. Just think, 3 or 4 years ago, 250GB drives were the largest SATA drives certified for storage arrays. Now, with 750GB to 1 TB in each slot, we have even more of a need to know when the data was created and when it needs to be archived or destroyed. With SSD’s rapidly making their way into storage arrays, data management and subsequent movement becomes an truly crucial cost saving tool.

I guess the part about all this that baffles me the most is liability. One would think that if you were going to be legally liable to either hold onto or destroy files or information you’d probably want an automated, “people-resistant” system in place to handle all that. At another recent Techtarget event on DR, Jon Toigo talked about a data map and knowing how valuable your data is in order to best protect the most valuable data. Sounds like pretty straightforward, common-sense approach, but as far as I know only one vendor is doing it in hardware, and most of the software vendors have gone quiet with their marketing behind it.

The term Information Lifecycle Management conjures up thoughts of managed data, orderly storage environments, documented processes, and responsible governance for me. All things I’ve seen brought up in blogs (some of my own blog posts included) and articles, and expressed as concerns for businesses large and small. So why has it gone underground?

Data deduplication is the poster child of 2008. Everyone is rushing to add this capability to just about everything that could possibly ever sit on a network–I thought I saw an ad for a cable tester with de-dupe built in! On the face of it, de-dupe looks like the savior it’s made out to be (except in very isolated instances where it actually inflates the size of stored data, but that’s another subject for another time.).

But take a look a little deeper with my paranoid, curmudgeon-y, semi-lawyer-esque hat on.

De-dupe technology has been likened to “zip” on the fly (no pun intended), which is where I have a couple of problems while wearing my pseudo-legal hat. The first is the act of compression. Way back in the olden days of computing there was a product appropriately named Stacker; its purpose in life was to allow you to fit more on the ridiculously expensive devices we had in our computer called “hard drives”. Microsoft, not content with Stac backing out of a licensing deal, created DoubleSpace (got sued and lost), then DriveSpace (DOS 6.21).

Via the use of a TSR (even the acronym is dusty), these products would intercept all calls destined for your hard drive and compress the data before it got there. Sound familiar? Those disk compression tools had their run, I used them but it presented problems with memory management, at the time Bill Gates decided no one would ever need more than 640KB, amongst other things. This presented a phenomenally large problem when I would load up one of my favorite games at the time from Spectrum Holobyte: Falcon 3.0, Falcon fans know what sorts of contortions one had to endure to get enough lower memory to run Falcon, but I digress.

So I would try to get around having Stacker or DoubleSpace turned on all the time. That didn’t work out well for me, and I spent quite a bit of time compressing and re-compressing my hard drive, enabling and disabling Stacker and DoubleSpace and setting up various non-compressed partitions.

While I don’t see that specific instance as an issue now per se, I do have that (bad) experience, and because of it I have a problem with something sitting inline with my data, compressing it with a proprietary algorithm that I can’t undo if/when the device decides it doesn’t like me anymore. Jumping back 16 years, it wasn’t that hard to format and reinstall DOS, which was a small part of my (then gigantic) 160MB ESDI hard drive, to get around the problems I had. But today when we are talking about multiple Terabytes and such, I want to be sure that I can get to my data unfettered when I need it.

The reason I am paranoid about getting access to my data when I need it: compliance and legal situations. Which brings me to my second point. How will de-dupe stand up in court? Is it even an issue? Is compression so well understood and accepted that it wouldn’t even be problem? Even as paranoid as I am I would have to say … maybe.

Compression has been around for a very long time, we are used to it, we accept it, and we accept some if its shortcomings (ever try to recover a corrupted zip file?) and its limitations, but will that stand up in court? In today’s digital world there are quite a few things that are being decided in our court systems that may not necessarily make sense. Are we sure our legislators understand the differences between a zip (lossless) and JPEG (lossy) compression? How does the act of compressing affect the validity of the data? Does it affect the metadata or envelope information? The answer to these questions, while second nature for us technology folks, may not so second nature for the people deciding court cases. Because compressing and decompressing data is a physical change to the data itself, I can imagine a lawyer trying to invalidate data based on that fact.

I hope that doesn’t turn out to be the case. The de-dupe products currently on the market have some astounding technology and performance. They also return quite a bit to the bottom line when used as prescribed, and the solid quantifiable return on investment they represent does for most outweigh any risks.

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to spend some quality time behind the keyboard, I’ve been suffering from a gigantic “honey-do” list and it was difficult for me to use some huge work emergency to weasel out of it! In the time I haven’t been blogging there’s been some major storage news: Sun says that SSDs are ready for arrays while Western Digital is reportedly developing 20,000 rpm drives.

I’ve been chomping at the bit to get my hands on an SSD for my desktop. After going SAS, I’m open to the prospect of even higher performance for my desktop disk subsystem, and it’s something I think I’m going to be chasing from now on.

We’re currently rolling out SSDs in a limited deployment for highly available single hard disk bay blades (say that three times fast). IBM has managed to fit a RAID 1 setup in a single drive bay for their line of blades and we like the performance numbers as well as the idea of no moving parts at all in a blade with onboard storage. Not only will we have the higher MTBF of the SSDs but the read performance is crazy!

Three months ago I was talking about how SAS would spell doom for SATA. Well, now I’m ready to eat some crow because in no way did I expect SSDs to become this close to affordable this quickly. Take a look at the non-server market: Lenovo and Apple are already offering laptop models with SSD exclusively.

SSDs have a lower power and heat footprint and have great read speeds. Write speeds aren’t as good as the read speeds, but slap a couple together in RAID 0 and that issue becomes moot. SSD looks like a shoe-in to be the next big thing. Or does it. . . ?

My take on the possibility of a 20,000 rpm drive is that Western Digital might not like the idea of the next big thing being something that isn’t, well, theirs. They also just released the 10,000 rpm Velociraptor SATA drive, which in itself something spectacular, since it brings the performance of higher-rpm SAS down to the cheap, ubiquitous SATA controller.

Details are sketchy when it comes to the potential heat and power of the alleged 20,000 rpm drive. It may not even make it to market, and there might not be much place for it with solid state drives delivering even faster performance with less in the way of power and cooling requirements. But me, I’m interested to see a knife fight between traditional disks (and maybe hybrids) and SSDs, since it can only result in me getting a faster storage subsystem, and it may lower prices even more.

In fact, I’m a little annoyed that it’s taken the disk industry this bleeding long to come up with an additional 5,000 rpm. I’m sure some of you out there are in the hard drive industry and have a list of reasons why it’s a hard thing to do. To which I, the jaded technologist/consumer, say, “So?” We live in an age where we have teraflop chips on video cards, where chips in mp3 players have more computing power than the first Space Shuttle, where cars park themselves and where we can see full color photos beamed back from Mars. MARS!! If you ask me, 15,000 rpm has been the ceiling for waaaaaaaay too long.

The economy has been on the mind of just about everybody recently, and with good reason. Gas at near record highs, unemployment rising, housing values reportedly dropping, the credit crunch and foreclosures numbering in the bazillions it is easy to see why people are not exactly upbeat about the state of our economy.

In the storage market, however, it’s looking like a blockbuster year. EMC and others are reportedly on track to meet or beat financial analysts’ estimates, and that leads me to today’s blog.

As it turns out, the impetus for this blog post was my recent attendance at a DR seminar put on by Storage Decisions featuring Jon Toigo. Looking around the room, I couldn’t help but think of what it looked like in the early days of “network administrators” when people didn’t think of network pros as any different from the server guys. Today, the storage admin is being called on to be part lawyer, part business analyst, part networking guru and all-knowing about all things storage, but there are very few companies with a dedicated storage team (outside the Fortune 500’s that have Exabytes of storage to manage).

For the most part (and please chime in with your experience) storage folks are still viewed as “server guys”. This is, of course, changing, and I wouldn’t bring it up if there weren’t a bigger point to be made: if you do a quick scan of Monster, Dice or Jobcircle, there are more and more listings specifically calling for a “Storage Administrator”. Storage is fast becoming the segment to be in–the information infrasructure could not function without it, and it is increasingly becoming the focus of much planning and resource allocation, in terms of both time and money. Talk to most companies, and they have storage budgets that are going up even in a down market, and they are hiring people to dedicate to the task of storage. Storage pros are more highly valued, and their pay is going up.

So what does this have to do with DR? DR is, at its basic level, moving data from one place to another, on a regular basis, far enough away that if you had a disaster you could recover your data and continue operations in the face of a disaster. This, in almost every case that I can think of, requires storage, storage networking technologies and someone who knows enough about them to set it all up and keep it working in a changing environment. Hence all the storage pros in the room vs business types that normally involve themselves in DR.

Toigo put on a great presentation. It was filled with a ton of valuable information and even if you have nothing to do with the DR planning and implementation at your company, I would enthusiastically recommend attending one in your area. I walked in thinking I had a passable grasp of DR best practices and walked out realizing I had barely scratched the surface, and that as a storage professional I needed to understand more about business practices as they relate to DR.

For example, Toigo discussed what a data model was and not only how to build one but suggestions on explaining it to non-technical analysts so we could all use it together to ultimately build a workable DR plan around valuable data instead of putting together a set of technologies to make our systems highly available but unable to really recover from a disaster. And it’s the storage guy who should be taking the lead on that.

Think of the value you bring to the table when you can not only provide the information infrastructure, but also assist in developing a DR plan that will keep the business functioning, and generating revenue in a disaster. In the process, you can also create things that have intrinsic value to multiple business units–think of what information security can do if they know what a document or document type is worth as compared to other documents. My fellow storage pros, I’m seeing a bright future for us.

This blog is about three months in the making.

First, a bit of background. Several posts ago, I predicted the death of SATA in favor of SAS, which is only marginally more expensive (not talking the dirt-cheap integrated SATA controllers, but higher-end cache-carrying SATA RAID controllers) for an admittedly smaller capacity but much higher speed.

After using SAS on some of the servers and blades at work, I came home to my SATA-based desktop computer and wept silently whenever I did anything disk-intensive, because it was soooooo much slower. I have SCSI for the OS in all my server equipment, but even those machines weren’t as peppy as the SAS stuff at work. Taking these two things into account, plus the fact that the games I like to play are all disk I/O intensive, then throwing in a bit of friendly rivalry for good measure, I decided to upgrade my desktop machine to use SAS storage.

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I’m not sure how we get all mired in TLA’s but this FRCP is going to be a PITA (pain in the you-know-where), because it’s a four-letter acronym!

I’ve been fielding quite a few requests for legal holds recently, and I’ve been tracking the storage used by legal holds on our SAN and tape library. Out of curiosity, I started doing research on the average length of a trial, then tabulating the cost of storing the data requested on WORM for that time.

Guess what I’ve found?Some trials last a loooooooong time, and the costs are not insignificant. Now I see why Beth has been ringing the alarm about FRCP.

My company has been very lucky — we have a great risk and legal team as well as solid policy.  But people will still sue if you have a business address. The incidental cost of keeping someone’s mailbox around for five years or so while they litigate (then appeal when they lose) is high, but can a company afford not to do so? What happens when you can’t produce an email to back up your side of a dispute? Worse still, what if the other side accuses you of damaging their case by not providing them with the emails they’ve requested?

There’s a “Safe Harbor” clause in the FRCP that absolves companies of responsibility if the company has — and strictly follows — a deletion and retention policy. This protects the company from falling afoul of the regulation, but does my act (as an end user) of deleting an email fall under the “Safe Harbor” clause?

Let me put on my lawyer hat. Okay, it’s on. I’ve seen some precedent that leads me to believe that simply having and following a policy is not enough. Say that, as a network administrator, I have a policy that strictly prohibits viewing pornography on a company network. I can communicate the policy, but if I don’t have measures in place to actively block pornography or follow up complaints about it, I may leave myself open to suit. Some of you may be thinking, “Why would you have a rule that you can’t look at pornography and not have a content filter in place?” My point exactly: Why have a deletion and retention policy, and allow people to do their own deleting and retaining?

This is going to get very esoteric and confusing (as many of our laws are), but what I took away from this article was this: If you allow me to do something, you may be implicitly approving of the behavior. Not to mention that while the employee viewing the pornography is breaking the rules and doesn’t have a case against me, what about the person walking by their terminal who sees it against their will?

So as it relates to e-discovery, if you allow me to delete my own emails, are you implicitly approving of me disobeying retention and deletion policy?

I started thinking about this a little deeper (which almost always spells trouble) and technically, it seems like I would have to have CDP in place and store every email entering and leaving every mailbox forever to be really covered against every contingency. Suppose I’m an end-user, and I delete an incriminating email, but then sue and claim I need the email to prove my case, and that you should have that email available. . .BUT my mailbox wasn’t backed up before I deleted the message. Are you, the respondent, still in hot water?

Implications abound here. Will SMBs that fall under some form of regulation — SOX, HIPAA, etc. — have to store every email forever? I’d love some readers to weigh in on this. Have any of you out there fought this battle with management? Do you know of any vendors that have products that address this particular issue?

I’m curious as to how deep this particular rabbit hole goes and how many folks have been forced to follow it to its logical end. Is there a crazy playing card there yelling “Off with their heads!!”?

I’ve been seeing the scuttlebutt about Apple and Promise Technology and couldn’t help but add my two cents about how many Promise arrays I’ve seen pop up lately.

Last week, while installing our IBM N-series, I saw a couple of admins installing a multi-shelf Promise array. Peering through the cages in one of our colo areas, I’ve seen quite a few Promise and generic arrays installed. Walking the aisles in the areas I have access to, I’ve seen a rapid uptick in the installation of Off-Broadway-brand array vendors.

We own a small (5TB) Promise V-Track array we use for limited duty validation and testing (we bought it before the Storevault was released). I like it — it certainly fills the need and it does what it’s supposed to do. I can buy any brand and size SATA hard drive I want and the management tools come with the product at no additional charge. I was able to set it up in about 30 minutes and after the drive initialization (took close to 24! hours) I was all set and ready to go, all without a PhD. I even did the guy thing and didn’t read the instructions! I don’t know about you, but I can’t really ask for more, considering the price.

I’ve seen the folks at Apple accused of being stupid or lacking foresight in the past (Steve, I’m still upset about my Newton!!). In recent years, the accusers have usually been dining on crow, given the fact that Apple’s products consistently create trends. (Anyone up for an iDog?) I firmly believe they know something about the trend towards lower-cost generic arrays using generic disks in generic trays, otherwise (at least in my mind anyway), a company that prides itself on solidly locking you into their hardware when you use their software would have gone with a more mainstream storage vendor, or simply re-branded something and inserted a v-chip.

You’ve read me typing this for a couple of blog posts now, but I’ll type it again: Small to midsized SANs for under $50,000 with simple software and easy to use interfaces are going to be the market in the coming years. I’ll go a step further and say the days of proprietary drive trays and “enterprise-class ” drives are numbered too.

I seem to recall another big vendor that often gets maligned for lacking foresight snapping up a low-cost storage array vendor recently.

More importantly, Apple knows how to make difficult things easy and stylish. Not to mention that people who OEM for Apple (Foxconn , Acer et al.) are quite happy pumping out the iWhatever. It wouldn’t be too far-fetched to see Promise doing the same.

If there was ever a company that could pull off making a product that does easy data migration … see where I’m going with this?

Couple Apple’s really-easy-to-use SAN software with low-cost generic arrays and you could have a quick rise to major player in the storage software market. . .for a company many thought would be out of business by now, bringing in another company that “real” storage vendors look down their nose at.

Don’t know if I can compete with militant dolphins and black holes that eat France, but I’m going to give it a shot.

First, I need to define constraints before we dig into the meat: What I consider a small to medium-sized business (SMB) is a company that would have a problem justifying a $50,000 purchase for a product that would perform a migration then have no use for it for 3 to 5 years until they migrate again, or have one to two IT people doing the work, or think a SAN is just a typo for SAN-D that you’d find at a beach. I know IBM, Sun, Symantec et al. have migration services but I’m looking at the smaller business space where people need to store more on tighter budgets that were small to begin with.

We’ve recently upgraded our SAN infrastructure and while our data migration chores aren’t all that intense, I’d still prefer that a computer did it. I’ve built some tools to handle my cleanup work (I’ll share them as soon as some bugs are worked out) but only because I couldn’t easily buy something to do the same or better. Now I’ll admit that sometimes I can be blind or ignorant (or both), but I’ve noticed a HUGE gap in the availability of migration tools for the lower end of the SMB spectrum. With me being a part of The Matrix like I am, or akin to Mr. Universe from Serenity, one would think I’d have caught a whiff of something significant.

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I was talking with a friend the other day about the prospect of multi-terabyte hard drives and how painful it would be to lose that much data. My friend — being my friend of course — countered that it’s not the amount of data, but where it resides and what the data is that’s important.

For instance, he went on, the EEPROM on your desktop motherboard isn’t more than 2MB worth of data. Yet without it the bazillion hours of work you have stored on your desktop hard drive, while safe and sound, is still useless to you because you can’t access it because your computer won’t boot.

After conceding the point, I rephrased the statement to emphasize the loss of multiple terabytes of data residing on a platter-based spinning medium, located in a computer or computer-like device providing data storage services to said computer, group of computers, or computer-like devices (whew!).

Without blinking an eye, he said he’d started a hard drive data recovery company. He built a clean room and had been perfecting his recovery skills on hard drives purchased on, all of places, eBay. As an aside, use a hammer and nail, or Sawzall, to properly delete all data from unwanted hard drives you dispose of.

A while back, I got a frantic call from a family member whose laptop hard drive had crashed. She was beside herself because on her hard drive were all the digital photos she’d ever taken. . .ALL of them. She’d meant to back up her stuff to a disk but never got around to it. She wanted to know was there anything I could do to help her.

That is when it hit me full force, I have brilliant and baleful friends.

My friend recovered almost all the data from her hard drive for me (at a very reasonable price) and now she has the first pictures of her child, some of her wedding photos and other very important moments in her life back, and on DVD this time. The whole saga got me thinking: Am I really protected from a hard drive crash? How about the executives I support? What would I do if my array at home failed where I have all of my photos!

Seeing the look on my relative’s face when I presented her with all of her photos was priceless. But it got me thinking about all the other people out there in the SMB world with the 0.5 person IT shop who don’t even know these services exist, much less who can afford the super-high cost of traditional data recovery. I don’t think today’s data protection schemes are going to be able to handle the eventuality of these super-sized drives making their way to the same SMB shops.

Do the math. A decent 100Mb pipe can push about 3TB an hour (this takes into account -25% for packet and transmission overhead). If you had three people with a terabyte drive, you’d saturate a 100MB uplink should they decide to back up to a device on the network. How are we going to back that up? The storage SaaS startups making their way to market aren’t going to be able to keep up either. Imagine backing up 400-700GB over your home Internet link where your upstream bandwidth is only 768Kbps.

I saw this coming a bit back when I got my grubby hands on the Hitachi Terabyte drive and have begun using a combination of VMware Player and VMware Workstation to mitigate my issues with capacious storage at home. I essentially virtualize the machine I want to use and deploy that on top of a generic OS install, replete with a pretty icon (in my case, Debian Linux), instructing the user to launch the player as their “desktop.” I’ll eventually get to a point where I will move upward from Player to Workstation for all my machines (right now cost is limiting me to using player for most of my machines), then run snapshots and back up the snaps to the same location as the original VMDK using RSync.

It sounds like a lot of work, but try explaining to your wife that she’s lost all her projects she’s been working on and you don’t have a recent backup because her drive is too big to back up quickly. You’ll appreciate the effort that much more when you can say, “I’ve got you covered, hon!!”

Here’s the visual I use when I explain this concept.

1) Fold a piece of paper four times (or use a folded napkin)

1a) Imagine the paper (napkin) as your physical hard drive

2) Tear off two or three 1-inch pieces of that napkin. Put them on the table next to the napkin.

2a) Imagine those pieces as virtual hard drives or volumes.

3) Reorder those 1-inch pieces of the napkin. Easy, isn’t it?

4) Peel apart the layers of those 1-inch pieces, 4x as much stuff to manipulate, making it take a little longer to move things around the table, no?

4a) Imagine those layers as individual files.

Take this one step further. Blow a soft puff of air at the three 1-inch pieces before you peel them apart (this works best with the napkin as they are slightly “stuck” together). Think of that puff of air as a failure or some sort of issue with storage. Do the same when you’ve peeled apart the pieces.

Now you have a great way to envision how your task of managing individual files (family photos) on a gargantuan hard drive (look how much napkin you have left!!). Multiply that out by a couple of napkins and you see why all of a sudden this problem of failed drives and how to protect against it becomes really hard in the TB-drive world. This can open eyes at the management level. It puts a real and appropriate understanding of why we as storage admins freak out at times when they refuse to allocate budget.

I started out talking about the advent of huge drives and what are you going to do to get the data back should they fail? I’ve developed my own solution to protect myself using some free and not-so-free tools from VMware, but I’m not sure it would scale well, or be easily manageable. Maybe a small challenge to the hardcore virtualizers out there may be in order. . . .

Have you ever heard of the “butterfly effect“? In essence, it is a way to conceptualize the possibility that the flapping of butterfly wings in the Amazon Jungle can be the catalyst for a hurricane in Texas.

I think–now, mind you, this is just a thought–the same is going to occur on eBay with storage.

All the innovation currently going on in the enterprise storage arena–10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) and iSCSI come to mind — is going to be a catalyst that makes businesses retire storage technology faster than usual, filling the secondary market with great usable stuff.

So if you’re a budding storage geek, or an established one looking for the next challenge, eBay is going to become the place to shop. It is not for the faint of heart–that array you spent $200,000 on? Well, $1000, “Buy It Now” and nominal shipping may be able to snag it!! (A slight exaggeration, but I DID find a StorageTek Flex D280 for sale for $2000, with disks!!)

The butterfly here is progress. There will be a tropical storm from progress flapping its wings when these folks enter the workforce, or bring ideas they’ve tried out at home, without limits on uptime or intervention from management, to work. This will cause a fresh round of grassroots innovation that will come from people who can tinker untrammeled (The English language never ceases to amaze me. Thanks for this submission!).

The Linksys WRT-54Gl is a great example of how a group of tinkerers can influence a large company. Check out DD-WRT. Ever wonder why so many wireless routers are coming with USB or e-SATA ports on them nowadays? That started with some hackers wanting to add storage.

eBay has allowed me to build what I otherwise couldn’t find a solid business justification for, or create an ROI schedule around, at work. I have the ability to test various scenarios and provide services to my toughest IT customers: my wife and 9 year old son! Not to mention I have a really geeky conversation piece.

Using myself as an example, I’ve been able to build 3 different versions of a home SAN using technology I purchased from eBay. The first was 1 Gbps FC from Compaq. I picked up a disk shelf for $29 and $40 for shipping. The disks cost a whopping $100 for 14, shipping included. The Fibre cards were $3 a pop. From that, I learned that proprietary SAN technology stinks. Open is the only way to go, so … I started the second iteration which cost a bit more to build.

The second iteration of my SAN was a bit more of an investment both time and money but a tenth the cost of new. I bought a new Areca 8 port SATA array controller with onboard RAM (the only new part in my SAN). I plugged it into a dual Opteron based motherboard with guts from eBay as well, and bought a lot of 10 (2 for spares) 250gb SATA drives. The drives were a deal of a lifetime, for just about $300 I got 2 Terabytes of storage!! Apparently they came out of a Promise array and the person upgraded to 500GB drives.

At the time, I didn’t have any Gigabit Ethernet ports so I opted to buy used 2Gbps fiber channel cards and a used fiber switch. This was a bit more costly than the first SAN so I put some of my old goodies over on eBay (!)  to foot the bill.

The third iteration is the one I’m currently constructing. The second SAN or Second of Many as I like to call it (an ode to Star Trek: Voyager) is still “in production” and servicing my Vmware and file sharing needs, but I felt the need to make it more modular. So far, I’ve gotten an unmanaged Gig-E switch, first generation TOE (TCP Offload Engine) NICs, the controller “head” and a couple SAS disks. I’m making the switch from a SATA controller to a SAS controller to allow for mix and match of speed and capacity on the same bus. I’ve sold some of my fiber and am going to try ISCSI this time.

The hurricane blows when progress has put 8 Gig fiber and 10Gig Ethernet in the datacenter en masse. This will push managed Gig-E components and 4Gbps fiber components out into the secondary market, and make folks like me and value conscious SMB buyers VERY happy!

How long this is going to take to appear I’m not so sure, but if this year is truly the year if iSCSI, I would suggest you open the Web filters to allow a little eBaying at lunch time. Type SAN into eBay see what you come up with.