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Storage: What's in 'Store' for the Future

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

Storage of data is a mission critical task and shall always remain that

way. There will always remain a need to find better solutions to store the ever

growing volumes of data. Looking at the future of storage technologies that the

industry is going to embrace, we discuss how file virtualization can play an

important role in making enterprise data management easier with almost nil

downtimes. Also, we crystal gaze to show how Nanotechnology shall drive storage

management in future. We also focus on future storage media being developed on

concepts like 3D holographic storage, carbon nanotubes and heat assisted

magnetic recording, revealing how, in a few years, terabytes of data would be

stored on a disk as small as a conventional DVD!

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Nanotechnologies Driving Data Storage of Future



To put it in simple words, Nanotechnology deals with engineering of

functional systems at the molecular scale. Generally, this deals with structures

of the size 100 nanometers or smaller, and involves developing materials or

devices within that size range. If mathematical conversions have not been your

forte, a nanometer is a billionth part of a meter. More like a comparison of a

marble with our planet.

Today, scientists are working day and night in order to develop systems that

would shape the future of the data storage industry. These could help us do away

with internal disk drives all together as well as the computer boot-up process,

bringing up applications instantaneously when a PC or laptop is turned on. Other

hardware may allow data to be stored for more than 100 years without having to

change or refresh media. Moreover, such technologies bring along the potential

for devices as small as flash drives to hold as much data in 10 years as the

world's largest data centers held only 10 years ago.

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RAM of the future



Carbon nanotubes lie at the heart of this concept. These are molecule-size

objects composed entirely of carbon in a cylindrical structure which gives them

unique properties. Some of these properties are steel like strength and

conduction of electricity both as a metal and a semiconductor.

The core

technology that goes behind Nanotube-based/non-volatile RAM.
3D holographic

storage solutions can make terrabytes of data fit into a standard CD/DVD

sized disk.

An interesting way in which carbon nanotubes are being used is in the

development of a high density, nonvolatile random access memory chip that could

replace dynamic RAM, flash memory and even hard drives. Nantero, a

nanotechnology company has built, using nanotubes a chip called NRAM (for

nanotube-based/nonvolatile RAM) that is faster than DRAM, as portable as flash

memory, and able to provide permanent storage because the wafer uses nonvolatile

storage as its basis. The technology has the potential to enable instant-on

computers that boot and reboot without delays and eliminate the need for

internal disk drives on computers.

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Holographic Optical drives



3D optical data storage is an innovation which has the potential to provide

TBs of data on a DVD sized disk. This is a form of optical data storage in which

information is stored or read on the medium in a 3D resolution as compared to

the 2D manner on the conventional CD/DVDs.

The left portion

shows the conventional multigrain media, while the right portion shows the

pattern media and the uniform arrangement of magnetic islands.

Colossal Storage is developing a rewritable 3-D volume holographic removable

disk media. The nanotechnology under development at Colossal is a possible

replacement for today's magnetic disk drives and memory chips. Unlike magnetic

media, which only stores data on the surface of the disk drive, holographic

optical disk drives use two or more laser beams that work with one another to

read and write data throughout the disk media. Advantages include 100+TB

capacities, near zero read and write response times and 100-plus year lifespan.

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Unlike AFM (Atomic force microscope)-based storage nanotechnologies, which

require two dissimilar materials to come into contact with each other and create

friction and shorten a disk media's lifespan, holographic storage has noncontact

surfaces, so it has a higher degree of reliability. Therefore users will have to

invest in a disk media once and won't be forced into continually reinvest in new

storage technologies.

Bit Patterned Media



The hard drive manufactures are vying for maximum areal density and storage

capacities for their drives. Bit areal density is considered to a benchmark to

measure progress in magnetic information recording technology. With Seagate

being able to achieve 375 GB of storage density into a single platter to become

the first to break the 1TB hard drive barrier with their Barracuda 7200.11 1.5

TB hard drive. But to scale the conventional magnetic recording technology to

increase the areal densities pose a challenge in form of superparamagnetic

effect. To counter this, researchers are working on Bit Patterned Media concept

which will help achive a terabit per square inch densities and beyond. The hard

drives today use the conventional magnetic recording technology, in which the

magnetic recording layer is a thin film of magnetic alloy. This magnetic alloy

film forms a random mosaic of nanometer scale grains that behave as independent

magnetic elements. Where each recorded bit is made up of several of these random

grains. However with bit patterned media, the magnetic layer is created as an

ordered array of highly uniform islands of grains for each individual bit of

recorded information. Research is being done to realize the disk fabrication for

such uniformly placed nanometer sized magnetic grains and also the overall

recording medium to read and write the data onto the drives.

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HAMR



Seagate is working on HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording) technology

that could extend magnetic recording areal density of hard drives by about a

factor of 10 beyond what can be accomplished with perpendicular recording, and

has the potential of extending the hard drive technology another six to seven

years beyond its five-year limit.

Use of laser and a magnetic head together to read and write data on a new and

more stable disk medium such as iron-platinum is what lies at the heart of HAMR.

The laser heats the disk medium while the magnetic head writes to it, allowing

the disk to store more data. After the media cools, the disk and data becomes

very stable. Research is being carried on a large number of media that can be

written by HAMR and iron-platinum materials and can theoretically support 50

terabits per square inch.

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We believe the phrase 'data increases in leaps and bounds' has outlived

itself. It's a given as far as corporates are concerned. Let me cite an example.

Did you know that the good old telephone took a massive 89 years to reach 150

million users, whereas the TV took 38 years. Any guesses on how much time did

Facebook take to reach the same mark? The answer is just five and that's not the

end of the debate. Facebook says it added five million users each week in

January 2009 and around 850 million photos were uploaded in February this year,

and the social networking site is used for 3 billion minutes everyday. So that's

my idea for analyzing the increase in data-get the idea?

Challenges in storage mgmt



Thanks to the ever burgeoning expansion in applications, digital media

formats, and regulatory compliance, taming today's exploding storage

requirements with the existing storage management methods has become an

unsurmountable task. Don't believe me? Well, according to IDC, storage

administrator productivity must increase by 60 percent every year to keep up

with the growth in storage capacity in an organization. And again that's not

all. Giving administrators nightmares are 24x 7 data access requirements which

brings down the number of windows available to perform management tasks to a

close to nil figure.

In order to achieve dramatic improvements while simplifying capacity,

performance and structured storage management, what's required is a holistic

approach. To start with, while alleviating data integrity problems, disaster

recovery issues and performance bottlenecks, any potential solution should not

bring any associated risk to the storage environment. Another legitimate concern

that IT managers have is how should end user access be managed as a solution

that needs special software installations and fine tuning at each server or

client easily outweighs the advantages of uninterrupted access during data

movement. Some of the key challenges when it comes to storage management are:

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1. Challenges related to capacity



As mismanagement of storage capacities still prevails in most organizations,
average utilization is not up to the mark. Adding to the problems is the 'per TB

management cost' approach. And over- provisioning, which might seem like an easy

way out, can be an extremely expensive affair.

2. Challenges related to performance



Performance related challenges pose a threat to the efficiency of the people

working within an organization. For example, when the administrator performs

management tasks, the user productivity takes a beating due to poor response

times. Also, application throughputs are limited due to I/O bandwidths.

Managing a

heterogeneous storage environment comprising of Linux and Windows file

servers can be seamlessly done without much downtime.

3. Storage consolidation challenges



With the potential to harm and have a negative impact on the productivity of

the workforce, consolidation projects might face internal roadblocks due to

organizational impact. Data relocations along with security and access settings

also come as a byproduct when executing consolidation projects.

EMC Rainfinity



By enabling unstructured data management without disturbing end user or

application access, EMC Rainfinity is the first solution to optimize IP based

storage with its patented Global File Virtualization (GFV) platform. The

solution optimizes Network Attached Storage (NAS), eases storage management

overhead, simplifies end user access and enables additional storage management

functionality. One major advantage of Rainfinity Global File Virtualization is

its capability to transparently move data including active, open files.

Where is it required?



Storage networks are getting more and more complex. The traditional Network

Attached Storage solutions have found siblings in larger enterprises. A NAS,

which was mainly used for file and print services over the network has now been

supplemented CAS and CFS. CAS or content addressable storage is mainly focused

on compliance issues and for securing data, whereas CFS or clustered file

systems are used to spread a large amount of data across devices usually in an

HPC (high performance computing) environment. Each of these storage systems have

their own storage management capabilities but you need a solution that can work

in the heterogeneous environment provided by them as well as manage them

together. It is environments like these where global File Virtualization can be

used. For example, a bank where data availability is mission critical and data

consolidation, archiving and other management steps need to be executed with as

less downtime as possible.

How does it work?



We all know, data migrations can be costly and time consuming as they

require long planning windows and coordination with end users. However, Global

File Virtualization (GFV) leverages the power of an IP network. The Rainfinity

appliance is deployed on the IP network itself. Let's take an example of a data

center environment where you have ten file servers. Now if you want to migrate

data from server one to server 4 in order to balance capacity, end users might

face performance issues like greater response times. However, with the

Rainfinity appliance installed on the same network, it would take the ports

associated with these servers on the virtualization network till the time the

migration gets completed, hence giving the end user a lag free experience. Now

scale this example up to a very large enterprise where you might have billions

of files stored in different file servers and where authorizations and policy

management also play a major role. Rainfinity enables transparent data migration

without any disruption to the end user. In fact, files being used by the end

user can also be migrated as it allows the transfer of open files. Through the

global namespace management, the entire remapping and remounting can occur

seamlessly due to a single interface for devices, protocols and locations.

Benefits



Data migration and consolidation projects can take advantage of this

solution as it eliminates the need to coordinate with end users and schedule

downtimes. Such solutions can also dramatically reduce performance issues that

are usually caused by overburdened file systems while balancing storage

utilization. On the lines of capacity management, administrators can adjust the

available resources or take actions as and when needed in order to achieve a

greater value for money from the data storage investments. And finally the

solution can be used in a heterogeneous environment as it is capable of

supporting network storage solutions from different sources, including EMC

Celerra, NetApp, and Windows/UNIX/Linux file servers.

GFV & storage mgmt apps



To simplify storage management, increase flexibility and lower costs in the

data storage environment EMC Rainfinity combines Global File Virtualization with

purpose built applications. As a result, it makes optimization of networked

storage with applications that identify, analyze and rectify capacity,

performance and tiered storage issues, provisioning for active data management.

A few areas where such data management applications are used can be capacity

management, file management, global namespace management, tiered storage

management, performance management, storage consolidation and synchronous

mirroring.

Varun Jaitly with inputs from Rahul Sah

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