Roger Kelley

My last post addressed issues encountered when hard drives, and especially ultra-large hard drives, vibrate too much. Another issue particularly concerning with ultra-large hard drives is something called an unrecoverable bit error (UBE). Although rarely discussed with potential customers and definitely a topic "down in the weeds" UBE is a problem anyone working with ultra-large hard drives and RAID sets will eventually have to deal with. Why? Because as drives get bigger and bigger, RAID striping puts the end user at risk for having to read more blocks of data than the hard drive UBE can accommodate reliably and the rebuild from parity won't complete thus compromising the entire RAID set. So what is UBE? All hard drives have unrecoverable bit error ratings (UBER) which indicate how many bits a drive can likely transfer before encountering an UBE. Normally a drive c... (more)

Buying A Storage Array? 5 Questions You Should Ask!

Buying a storage array can often feel like buying a mattress. The product is the same but the labels are different so you're not certain you are comparing the same thing in the same way. There are areas in life you can scrimp on, but SAN storage and mattresses aren't among those. The choice you make will impact your daily life for years to come so buy the best you can afford or suffer the consequences. To help with that there are at least 5 questions, in no particular order, you should ask of each storage vendor you interview: 1. How far does the array scale and what happens after ... (more)

Storage Forecast-Clouds and SUN with WIND, RAIN, ISE, HAIL, and SNOW Likely!

I was reflecting on the recent announcement from Xiotech releasing their new Intelligent Application Storage (IAS) initiative and how it would play into the Cloud design being bantered about by the industry of late. If you are not familiar with the Cloud concept it has to do with designing IT infrastructure where everything (software, hardware, storage, etc.) becomes a service rather than an island unto itself. The concept behind the Cloud makes sense--to design our infrastructures so that user and organizational demands control resources rather than letting resources control dem... (more)

"Why Can't Storage Just Simply Plug into the Cloud?"

The lament above came from a potential customer, frustrated that storage continues to be one of the most difficult parts of datacenter planning. I thought it would be a good topic to consider especially since "cloud" seems to be the newest important buzzword of the day. The simple answer to the question above is that storage has always been proprietary and monolithic in its design. Although storage vendors have made doing things within the confines of their storage easier as time has gone by the truth remains that the storage silo architecture is not conducive to the "Cloud" conc... (more)

Ginormous Hard Drives Part 1-Why Drives Should be Frozen in a Block of ISE

For the customers that buy them and the people that sell them, large hard drives are a thing of beauty. "Cheap and Deep" is the mantra that calms the nerves of those trying to accommodate an era of surging data and dwindling budgets. On the other hand, for those technical and engineering types that actually make their living working with large hard drives (or more accurately, make their living making large hard drives work) the impression can be quite different. For those of us who, in 1980, marveled at the immense size and elegance of the first microcomputer hard drive (Seagate ... (more)