So where’s the focus?

Off tomorrow to do another trade show … the usual tyre-kickers intermingled with a very intelligent crowd of business people interested in finding out where the future of storage lies.

Trouble is, of course, it depends on what magazine you read, or analyst you listen to, as to what the future holds.

Personally speaking, I’m finding a lot of interest in SAN. It’s a quiet revolution being driven by the Virtual Storage Crowd. If you are gong to virtualise your servers then you’d better put all their storage on a box you can expand, manipulate, mirror etc … not just in direct-attached drives. The fibre market is still prohibitive in cost for the SMB, but iSCSI helps to bring that back to reality.

Of course, there is a big market for direct-attached even in the virtual server world. There are a lot of smaller users who want to run just a few servers on the one piece of hardware and direct-attached storage is fine for them. But as the number of virtual and physical servers increases, and the complexity of the virtual world and server infrastructure grows, so does the pressure to move the storage for VM’s, data and virtual desktop images onto SAN storage where you have better flexibility.

So at the moment it appears it’s the larger end of town that is interested in SAN, with the smaller side of things sticking with direct-attached storage. But for how long? Send me your thoughts on where your organisations are going with SAN vs DAS.

Ciao
Neil