While waiting for my flight in the airline lounge in Beijing, I noticed a TV program that was running on one of the state run channels. On the HDTV screen was a young lady who was standing in front of a large flat panel monitor that must have been over 100 inches. It was a touch screen monitor which she could control by touching the screen and drag images to different locations and magnify by tapping on the screen. I soon realized that she was doing a telecast of the news by reading and showing the newspaper on this high tech screen which was in turn being broadcasted over the flat panel HDTV screen in the lounge. The whole half hour program was spent watching this young lady scrolling through the newspaper on the high tech monitor in the television studio while she commented on the news. This seemed to me a low tech waste of high tech capability. But I guess this is not unusual. It takes time to adapt old ways to new capabilities.

I see similar examples in storage.

I have heard of IT shops that standardized on 2 GB LUNs many years ago when the state of the art disk held 2GB. The reason they standardized on one LUN size was to simplify the mapping of disk configurations into cache. They continue to use 2GB LUNs today with disks that have capacities of 300 to 500GB. With 2GB LUNs, they can’t fill up the new disk systems because they run out of LUN numbers, even at 64,000 LUNs. They spend a lot of time managing these small LUNs when they  could save this effort by going to larger LUNs that better match today’s disk and application technologies.      

Storage Area Network were introduced over 10 years ago and the scalability and connectivity benefits of switched connections between servers and storage are well proven and accepted. No one would go back to direct attached or even arbitrated loops. Yet there are very few vendors that have incorporated the concept of switching into their storage architecture. Having switched connections between the storage ports, the cache, and backend disk directors has similar benefits for connectivity and scalability over shared arbitrated busses and direct attached matrixes. While theses connections have gotten much faster with each generation, they still lack the scalable flexibility of a non blocking, crossbar switch. Hitachi is the only storage vendor that has been providing a switched storage controller for the last 7 years. We recently expanded that by implementing a switch connection between the back end disk directors and the individual disks.  Its time to switch to switches.

Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) is another obsolete storage concept that persists today. HSM was fist delivered by IBM when the only disks were expensive mainframe disks. HSM would migrate less active files from primary to secondary disks based on time or activity. Since primary and secondary disks were still the same expensive mainframe disks, HSM would use mainframe cycles to compress the data that was moved to secondary disk in order to use less space on the secondary disk. In order to access the data that had been migrated, HSM had to uncompress the data on the secondary disk and move it back to primary disk Today, with storage control unit based virtualization, data can be migrated to lower cost SATA disk drives without the need to use mainframe cycles for compression, and when that data needs to be accessed it can be accessed directly from the SATA disk without the need to migrate it back up the hierarchy.

The whole idea of hierarchies is becoming obsolete due to the growing demands of data storage and retrieval. Hierarchical file systems, the concept of finding files by putting them into a hierarchical system of named folders, will not be able to support the explosion of data that we are beginning to experience. There are new technologies around content archive, object store, and common search which are available today to meet the growing demand for unstructured data access..

Steve Duplessie points out the need to think differently about content or persistent data versus dynamic data in his post, Think Differently/Live better. 

These are just a few examples. If you think of other examples please drop me a comment. .

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