Storiant’s Weekly Storage Scene
Today we kick-off our brand new Storage Scene blog series, where we will be rounding up the most newsworthy and interesting industry news from the past week. For our first post, we take a look at the growing innovations and collaboration in the storage industry – and why it matters moving forward.
Facebook has Built a Prototype System for Storing Petabytes on Blu-ray
GigaOM’s Derrick Harris (@derrickharris) discusses Facebook’s announcement of a prototype Blu-ray system at the Open Compute Summit in San Jose. In his presentation at OCP, Jay Parik, Facebook’s VP of engineering, announced that the company has built the first prototype Blu-ray system which is capable of storing 10,000 discs and one petabyte of data in a single cabinet. This announcement demonstrates how Facebook is exploring new territory in their cold storage efforts and working towards lowering costs and improving hardware design capabilities.
Microsoft Joins Open Compute Project, Shares its Server Designs
Also at OCP this week, Microsoft announced that it has joined the Open Compute Project; this article from Data Center Knowledge provides commentary and analysis of this decision. Author Rich Miller (@datacenter) writes that Microsoft’s contribution to OCP will be the specs and design for the cloud servers that run Bing, Windows Azure and Office 365, allowing vendors to use Microsoft’s designs when building hardware. Microsoft hopes their contribution will ultimately spur the growth of cloud computing while also helping their bottom line.
Big Data Analytics and Storage: Going Nowhere but Up in 2014
The last article, by Chris Preimesberger (@editingwhiz) at eWEEK, highlights why innovations like Facebook’s prototype and Microsoft’s collaboration matter. Preimesberger notes that IDC projections have big data storage set to advance at “a 40% compound annual growth rate, from $3.2 billion in 2010 to $17 billion in 2015.” With big data volume on the rise and the increasing demand for easier access to that data, there is a vast need for tools that “provide scalable, high-performance analytics at the lowest cost and in near-real time.” Preimesberger believes that this growth offers a huge opportunity for businesses in the storage industry – and we agree.
As we saw at the Open Compute Project Summit this week, data storage companies are developing new innovations and collaborating with one another to keep up with this growth. We look forward to being a major part of this effort with our own contributions in the coming months.
For an insider’s view on the Open Compute Project event, check out our own John Hogan’s blog post.
