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Fibre Channel technology is alive and kicking
Historically, Fibre Channel technology has been a top choice for enterprises in need of a high-speed interconnect for SANs. With the introduction of iSCSI storage, however, the landscape shifted. Ethernet networking gained acceptance for block storage and became popular for file, and later cloud-based, object storage. It costs less, requires no dedicated switching and special training, and offers adequate performance for most business applications. But don't sound the death knell for Fibre Channel technology; market research indicates widespread use and a slow decline.
Most storage vendors today offer object-based storage, and interest in these systems is high. Object storage offers massive scalability, potentially better data management with extended metadata, cloud storage integration via support for RESTful APIs and lower overall storage costs. The trick, of course, is integrating object and all of its capabilities into environments still dominated by SAN, NAS, and applications that continue to expect file or block storage interfaces. But, it's being done.
Big data, Hadoop, MapReduce, data warehousing, business intelligence… All of these analytics applications place new demands on storage systems and often require new or modified storage structures. The special requirements of these analytics-on-a-massive-scale apps, and how to effectively manage their supporting storage infrastructures, are detailed in this issue of Storage magazine.
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Features in this issue
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Fibre Channel storage alive and kicking
It's not the end of the world for Fibre Channel storage; market research from a variety of industry analysts indicates widespread use and a slow decline.
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Big data analytics applications impact storage systems
Analytics applications for big data have placed extensive demands on storage systems, which Mike Matchett says often requires new or modified storage structures.
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Need a business disaster recovery plan? You're not alone
Many companies either don’t see the need for a business disaster recovery plan or haven’t allocated enough resources to create a good DR plan.
Columns in this issue
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Commodity hardware is a myth
Software-defined storage vendors preach the concept of commodity storage hardware, but beware: the hardware is just as important as the apps.
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Cost savings for virtualizing servers not yet reality
Though you've heard for years that virtualizing servers will save money, Jon Toigo argues that the cost of virtualization hasn't lowered.
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Hyper-converged vendors focus on data protection
Hyper-convergence has impacted primary storage, but Arun Taneja says hyper-converged vendors are bringing the concept to data protection.
