Storage Clusters… What’s Not to Like
Storage clusters are now a proven commodity, with support from companies such as Oracle, IBM and NetApp. Highly resilient, simplified management, much lower cost. What’s not to like?
Here are some examples:
* The world’s largest data centers, Google, Amazon, Yahoo and Microsoft’s MSN, all use storage clusters for 7×24 availability in their advertising operations
* At least a dozen more firms are selling cluster storage, including NetApp, the fastest growing large storage company
* Polyserve and Red Hat’s GFS focus on storage clusters for Oracle and DB2 databases. With Oracle and IBM support.
* Omneon, a company specializing in storage and multi-media support for broadcasters, is selling “Media Grid” storage clusters. TV stations are a real-time 7×24 production environment: if the stuff doesn’t work, the TV station doesn’t get paid. It works.
* A storage cluster company - Isilon - just went public with a $1.4 Billion market cap
Arrays aren’t going away tomorrow, or ever. It took 10 years from the publication of the Berkeley RAID paper before RAID arrays took 50% of the external storage market. Yet storage cluster use has been growing rapidly in some major niches: internet data centers, video and broadcasting and web services. The 85% of enterprise data that is unstructured is the next big market for storage clusters.
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