I am excited. New technologies are bringing the data (and storage) closer to processing and compute than ever before. I believe the “Lift and Shift” way would be a thing of the past … soon.
Data is heavy
Moving data across the network is painful. Moving data across distributed networks is even more painful. To compile the recent first image of a black hole, an amount of 5PB or more had to shipped for central processing. If this was moved over a 10 Gigabit network, it would have taken weeks.
Furthermore, data has dependencies. Snapshots, clones, and other data relationships with applications and processes render data inert, weighing it down like an anchor of a ship.
When I first started in the industry more than 25 years ago, Direct Attached Storage (DAS) was the dominating storage platform. I had a bulky Sun MultiDisk Pack connected via Fast SCSI to my SPARCstation 2 (diagram below):
Then I was assigned as the implementation engineer for Hock Hua Bank (now defunct) retail banking project in their Sibu HQ in East Malaysia. It was the first Sun SPARCstorage 1000 (photo below), running a direct attached Fibre Channel 0.25 Gbps FCAL (Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop). It was the cusp of the birth of SAN (Storage Area Network).
Photo from https://www.cca.org/dave/tech/sys5/
The proliferation of SAN over the next 2 decades pushed DAS into obscurity, until SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) came about. Added to the mix was the prominence of Cloud Storage. But on-premises storage and Cloud Storage didn’t always come together. There was always a valley between the 2, until the public clouds gained a stronger foothold in the minds of IT and businesses. Today, both on-premises storage and cloud storage are slowly cosying as one Data Singularity, thanks to vision and conceptualization of data fabrics. NetApp was an early proponent of the Data Fabric concept 4 years ago. Continue reading
