rob@lazzurs.net

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14

Jul

Storage system wish list

Rob Lazzurs  in Tech

Having spent some time recently on storage products and what some of current storage systems can provide below is my wish list for the future.

  • Snapshots
  • Thin Provisioning
  • API
  • FC/SAS/SATA Disk support
  • FC/iSCSI/AoE SAN support
  • NFS/CIFS support
  • RAID-6/RAID-DP (I would prefer this to be software based, eg NetApp, ZFS, Linux)
  • No limitations (beyond performance limits) on the number of LUN/Disk groups/Volumes or any other logical containers
  • Easy moving or copying of the above mentioned logical containers
  • Hot failover
  • Hot software upgrades
  • Hot hardware replacement
  • Easy upgrade path
  • Free moon sticks ;)

(I am sure I have missed something….)

Now given the amount of time the industry has been spending on the long term storage of 1’s and 0’s you would have thought we would have a solution that meets all needs by now, within the physical limits of available technology of course, however as soon as I think I have found the perfect solution something goes wrong.

For now I have to say my best experience has been with NetApp, however they have some limitations mostly on their SAN side and scaling in the ISP environment that I am not perfectly happy with. Please don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that NetApp are the best of a bad bunch because they provide an excellent service and I have not had a NetApp filer fail me in production yet, they just don’t have everything on the above list :)

Well off to bang my head off of more brick walls :D

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2 Responsed To This Post

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sstelter said, July 16th, 2007 at 5:27 pm

Great post – I believe that the holy-grail of storage is coming, and when it does it will be based on a clustered grid of storage devices in order to deliver on some items on your wish list. While companies like Polyserve and Isilon have delivered some capabilities to the file serving space, LeftHand Networks is the leader on the SAN side of the house (in my opinion). Get them a look…http://www.lefthandnetworks.com

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Rob Lazzurs said, August 1st, 2007 at 4:12 pm

I have had a look at LeftHand and it is an excellent product that does indeed meet most of my requirements, however its limitation as I see it is your storage and IOPS capacity are linked. If you want further IOPS you have to add more disks. Now while I understand there is a link between the two this forces you to provision all of the IOPS capacity that your disks can handle, which if you are using the system for archival data as well as online data is not efficient.

If this was something LeftHand would split and certify more hardware platforms then it would be close to the perfect storage solution :)

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