Latest Trends in Storage Networking - Seattle, WA

Storage Day Welcome:  The Evolution of Storage Networking and The
Current Trends in the Industry   

This session sets the stage for the subsequent lectures at Data Storage Day. We start by looking at how today's enterprise SAN and NAS solutions evolved from humble direct-attached disk and file servers. We then turn our sights to the industry trends that are shaping the current wave of innovation. Specifically, we are interested in deduplication, storage virtualization, solid state storage devices, automated management of tiered storage, cloud storage, and massively scalable file systems.

Deduplication and Single Instance Storage:  Practical Applications for 
Backups, Archiving, and Primary Storage

Deduplication (dedupe) and single instance storage (SIS) are perhaps the hottest topics in the storage industry. EMC just acquired a dedupe startup for over two billion dollars! Meanwhile, all of the leading backup vendors are scrambling to integrate dedupe into their products. But this is just the beginning of a major new technology trend! Dedupe offers benefits not just for backups, but also for cloud storage, archiving, virtual desktops, and even primary storage for high performance production servers and VMs.

This session is broken into three parts:

• The first section discusses the fundamental technology of dedupe, revealing both the shortcomings of current approaches and the opportunities for new solutions.
• The second section focuses on dedupe for backups. We illustrate different ways to integrate dedupe into backup systems as well as revealing non-dedupe approaches that might deliver similar results at lower costs.
• Lastly, we describe applications for dedupe and SIS in rich media archives, virtual desktops, and primary storage.

Application Acceleration from the Data Storage Perspective:  New Advances in Caching and Solid State Storage

Data storage is just one element in the application delivery ecosystem, but it turns out that it is often the critical performance bottleneck.  A number of new technologies have recently come to market that optimize storage performance.  This session reviews several of these innovations and explains how performance-optimization technologies can be easily integrated into the existing storage infrastructure. 

Topics Include:

A Primer on Cloud Storage and High Capacity File Systems

The momentum behind cloud computing has really lit a fire under the chairs of developers of storage management software and file systems. Conventional storage technologies cannot scale limitlessly, not to mention that they are too rigid to expand and contract with the ebb and flow of the cloud. The cloud demands a whole new class of file systems and storage management approaches. As it turns out, the problems being tackled by cloud storage providers are problems that exist in private large-scale storage sites, so regardless of whether you plan to put compute resources in the cloud, you might find that cloud storage technology is relevant to you.

This session looks at the current state of cloud storage solutions while defining the basic terminology and illustrating the major problems left to solve. Special focus is given to object-based storage models as alternatives to conventional file systems.