SOHO/Consumer Storage: 40 Million Boxes, No Common Direction

Did you know that over 40 million consumer/SOHO NAS devices were sold last year?

Did you know that by the year 2012, the average home will have over 2 terabytes of data to manage?

Did you know that there are scores of companies racing to fill this every-widening data storage chasm in the digital home? Take a look at a cell cam photo of one of the three aisles at Frye's in San Jose.

(You probably did know about all this ...because only smart people read this blog!)

What you probably didn't know is the wide range of performance of these various devices. Some are lightning fast, with features for automatic backup, RAID, even a few with BitTorrent clients pre-installed (why would you want that?) How these devices perform, how they interoperate with other systems on the home/SOHO LAN, how they manage content (remember, you've got a mix of commercial and customer-originated content, as anyone who has tried to home-stream commercially downloaded music or video has found out).

How will these boxes work with Windows 7? How will they react to the upcoming US EPA Energy Star program? Oh, wait a minute.....there ARE NO SMALL NAS MANUFACTURERS WHO ARE WORKING ON THE STORAGE SPEC FOR THE ENERGY STAR PROGRAM.

How does this market organize? How does it adopt common policies and frameworks to help customers manage the ever-increasing amount of data in the average home? How does it make interoperability, DRM, data protection, and other good practices easy for these millions of customers.

Right now, in large part, they don't.

While there are some bright spots on the horizon, the marketplace for the small home network is a mess, and there's a great opportunity for a stands-driven, customer-focused, easy-to-deploy product that helps John and Jane Q. store their data.

I'll be talking more about this opportunity in the future.

Rick

EPA to Storage Industry: Give Me an Energy Star Program!

It's happening.

After years of discussions, meetings, discussions, meetings...

...and more meetings, it's finally happening.

The EPA has announced that it wants the industry's help in delivering a specification for computer storage for its Energy Star Program.

The EPA is holding a stakeholder meeting at the Sainte Claire Hotel in San Jose on Monday, July 20. Front end to SNIA's Technical Symposium (you didn't know about that either? Dude, didn't you get the memo? Summer is now for working.....)

If you work for a company that manufactures or sells storage devices, time to wake up.

SNIA has been pounding away for the past few years on a spec, on a taxonomy (so that we won't have a dumb standard that will drive government purchasers to buy storage arrays with one power supply so that they can be "green").

They have the framework and the process whereby the industry can collaborate and create a standard that will drive energy savings and good storage and information practices at the same time.

It's time for a lot of the observers to stop watching and get busy.

Help define the spec and help create the standard, or one will be made for you. If the prospect of government health care terrifies you, consider how these new programs will affect customer behavior--either for your products or for your competitors.

Time for the freeloading to stop.

Time for the "cheap green" marketing blitzes to cease (did we really believe that one storage array was 50% "greener" because you didn't ship a 2nd power supply with it?)

Time for an industry of innovators to roll up its sleeves.

Time to join, engage, dial-in, heads-up, Blackberry's down, stop tweeting and LinkedInning and get busy.

www.energystar.gov/newspecs.

You have till July 3 for your company to comment on the framework. SNIA has been working feverishly to submit a comprehensive, sane, technically feasible, and fair response.

It needs your help, or at least you should be aware of what's going on.

As a dabbler in Green Power in the late 1700's once said, "Gentlemen, we must hang together, or we shall certainly hang separately." Benjamin Franklin may not have understood digital storage, but he understood the notion of collaboration on behalf of a shared interest.

So you don't need a lightning bolt on your kite--the EPA just sent you one.

Rick

SNIA Builds a Bridge—to Somewhere Important

Every so often the SNIA organization amazes me. Companies and individuals who are competitors become collaborators over an important issue. Sheer naked capitalism stops for a few minutes to address an overarching problem.

When it does, it can be beautiful.

SNIA's Data Management Forum (DMF) has produced a new report that is sure to cause a stir in the information management world. Entitled Building a Terminology Bridge: Guidelines for Digital Information Retention and Preservation Practices in the Datacenter, this glossary/best-practices document signals the transformation of the discussion from the library and the corporate archive to the data center.

Sounds like a bridge to somewhere important.

For many corporations, the archive is an afterthought. Perhaps SOX and other regulatory drivers have made the archive bubble up a few notches, but it's really not that high—simply another cost along the way to the more important revenue targets of the average organization. But in 5 years' time, virtually 100% of the archives of most corporations will exist in digital form, and it's time for some serious head scratching about the implications of that transformation.

From the report: "The first task undertaken by the DMF was to reach out to the many preservation and archival communities and to investigate ‘prior-art’ such as existing standards and preservation “best-practices.” What rapidly became clear was that no definitive standards existed clarifying how to operate these practices in the datacenter. Yes, there are standards such as those published by the International Standards Organization, ISO, for libraries, data acquisition, and historical, artistic, or cultural records preservation practices, but not for the litigation-constrained enterprise datacenter with its billions of unstructured, semi-structured, and structured files and data-objects growing at 50% per year."

The DMF concluded that data is at risk of disappearing without some coherent approach to preservation and retirement. It drops a whammy on the industry by stating that the costs of moving the information from platform to platform over the years will be astronomical, and that folks need to start thinking about it. For anyone who has to do "format surfing" (I managed a 160 year-old library system for a school, and I can testify how frustrating and unscientific the entire process feels). Additionally, the DMF provides a common set of terms and a lexicon to make certain that teams and groups charged with solving these challenges are on the same page. Good information, and great context and background detail to make sure we're not talking past each other.

Nice job, SNIA folks...congrats on some hard work. Already the report is being picked up around the blogosphere and among the records/information management cogno-/digeroscenti, and it should at least get the conversation animated between the IT management and the information stewards of corporate America and the world.

Rick

Cloud Storage Standards are looking up

The SNIA has released early drafts of a couple of documents created in the new Cloud Storage TWG. The Cloud Storage Reference Model sets out a model of cloud storage elements that describes a logical view of their functions and capabilities using a descriptive taxonomy. The purpose of the model is to form a basis upon which industry efforts can be organized, needed standards identified and vendor products can be described by vendor independent terminology. In addition, the model is used to describe standard interfaces for cloud storage.

The SNIA will create a new interface called the Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) that will serve as both a functional interface to store data in a cloud, and as a management interface for the data that is stored there.

SNIA is soliciting feedback on the model and use cases in order to shape this interface work. If you would like to get involved, there is a Google Group you can join.