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