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Storage: Innovation in Data Storage — the Engine Behind Big Data
Big data and the current wave of data analytics is a direct result of the explosive growth of data that’s been occurring over the last decade. And the ability to collect massive amounts of data has been directly enabled by ever improving and ever-cheaper storage technologies. Consider that 30 years ago 1 Gig of RAM would cost close to $200,000 while today the cost is on the order of pennies.
The focus on data is becoming ever more intense, and that focus is driving continued innovation in storage technology. Major vendors like EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, NetApp, and Oracle Exadata are being challenged by upstarts with new sets of ideas. Bill Roth, vice president of marketing at Nexenta, said that “In many ways, NetApp and EMC are saddled with the innovator’s dilemma: They’ve got old file systems on proprietary hardware. We’re seeing success with open-source software, with new file systems and commodity hardware. I don’t think the legacy vendors are going to be able to keep up.”
Which are some of the new companies involved with new and innovative storage solutions? InfoStor recently reviewed six promising new storage technology companies:
Bitcasa – Offers very low-cost ‘unlimited’ cloud storage. Bitcasa has 20 patents on de-duplication, compression, and other storage technologies. To eliminate transfer latency between the cloud and the client, Bitcasa software makes a local cache of frequently accessed files and data and stores them on your local computer.
Zadara – Develops smart software to take advantage of commodity hardware by building a private cloud storage. Key to the technology is the ability to create virtualized separated storage areas, something they’re calling Virtual Private Storage Arrays (VPSA).
Starboard Storage – Their solution optimizes the best use of storage resources by dynamically provisioning storage. Starboard Storage provides hybrid storage management, overseeing a mix of SSDs and hard drives, balancing both performance and cost per Gigabyte requirements.
Inktank – Makers of Ceph, Open Source software with the goal of creating a “massively scalable, open source, distributed storage system.” Ceph can use commodity hardware. It is in the Linux kernel and included with the OpenStack cloud operating system.
Avere Systems – The Avere solution uses new Flash media with real-time tiering capabilities. The goal is to improve application performance scaling and to dramatically cut storage costs.
Kaminario – Creates storage solutions that use both Flash and DRAM SSD SAN storage technologies. The goal is to achieve high performance, low latency and high availability.
