Just as George McFly became a real man when he embraced his density, so shall we all.

This week, two big announcements were made about technologies that will/promise to dramatically increase the storage capacities of magnetic media.

The first came in a set of two papers presented by Toshiba at the 11th Joint MMM (Magnetism and Magnetic Materials) and Intermag (International Magnetic Conference) Conference in Washington D.C.

Per their press release:

“The Toshiba development team presented two papers titled,

• “MR Ratio and RA Design of CCP-GMR Film for over 2Tb/in2 Read Sensors”
• “Fabrication of Ridge-and Groove Servo Pattern Consisting Self-Assembled Dots for High-Density Bit Pattern Media.”

MR Ratio and RA Design of CCP-GMR Film for Over 2Tb/in2 Read Sensors technology was developed by Toshiba to extend the original Nano Contact Magneto-Resistive (NCMR) head technology that enables ultra-high sensitivity with a nano magnetic domain wall – aiming at a recording density of 5Tbpsi.  The development teams from the Corporate R&D Center in Kawasaki, Japan will present the research simulation results that revealed the key specifications of CCP-GMR and the resistance range for 2-to-5 Tbpsi NCMR heads.

The second paper, Fabrication of Ridge-and Groove Servo Pattern Consisting Self-Assembled Dots for High-Density Bit Pattern Media, will present bit patterned medium (BPM) in such a way that the magnetic recording layer is cut into rows of tiny magnetic dots in the size of one-bit.  A self-assembled material is used to create the bit pattern of 2.5 Tbpsi as well as servo signal patterns. The Toshiba development team from the Corporate R&D Center in Kanagawa, Japan will discuss their simulation study based on the fabricated BPM sample, the servo signal qualities and future challenges for BPM.”

The key takeaway is that we are rapidly approaching a 5 Tb per square inch recording capability of disk drives.

The second bit of density news came from IBM and FujiFilm today and has to do with tape.  Specifically, the companies are boasting a new recording method that will produce a 35 TB tape cartridge.  (Sort of a stick in the eye to those who claimed a few years ago that tape was dead and that it couldn’t keep pace with disk capacities.)

Here’s their release (geek alert):

“FUJIFILM Recording Media U.S.A., Inc. today announced that in cooperation with IBM, they have demonstrated a world record in data density on linear magnetic tape - a density of 29.5 billion bits per square inch with magnetic tape media developed using the BaFe particle. The demonstration points to the possibility of developing a single tape cartridge capable of holding 35 terabytes of uncompressed data – at least 44 times the amount of data that the current Generation 4 LTO Ultrium data cartridge holds.

“This exciting achievement shows that tape storage is alive and strong and will continue to provide users reliable data protection, while maintaining a cost advantage over other storage technologies, including hard disk drives and flash,” said Cindy Grossman, Vice President, IBM Tape and Archive Storage Systems. On a per gigabyte basis, tape-based storage systems can cost a fraction of what comparable hard disk storage systems cost and unlike disks which typically spin continuously, tape cartridges in a library slot or on a shelf do not  consume energy, which can make tape systems a highly energy efficient solution.

Dramatic increases in the volume of data that enterprises generate, transfer and store today has driven the need for increased, reliable storage media. In order to further expand the storage capacity of tape media, it has become necessary to increase recording density by using smaller and smaller metal particles. “This process of metal particle micrification becomes challenging because of the risks of losing the high coercivity that is essential for high recording density,” said Norio Shibata, President & CEO, Fujifilm Recording Media USA, Inc. “Fujifilm is the first media manufacturer to overcome this challenge of maintaining high coercivity with the development of its micrified BaFe particle, which delivers superior storage with lower noise and higher frequency characteristics than other metal particles.” Fujifilm first demonstrated the technology’s superiority with IBM in its 2006 demonstration achieving a world record in data density on linear magnetic tape.

Employing its advanced NANOCUBIC technology, Fujifilm succeeded in micro-particulation of the BaFe particle to 1600nm³, the equivalent of one-third of the current metal particle volume, uniformly dispersed and coated on a super smooth thin magnetic layer. This next generation version of Nanocubic technology uses a new ultra-fine, perpendicularly-oriented barium-ferrite magnetic medium that enables high-density data recording without using expensive metal sputtering or evaporation coating methods.  Because Fujifilm’s new technology orients the particles in a perpendicular fashion and controls disposition at nanometer levels, it has also improved the tape’s running stability.  Together with IBM’s new servo format pattern, new signal processing technology, and low-friction head technology, Fujifim’s technology improved areal density dramatically, and achieved a density of 29.5 billion bits per square inch.

Globally, Fujifilm is committed to developing highly functional materials and has applied its most advanced materials science, most recently advanced NANOCUBIC technology, to innovate products and solutions in the data storage marketplace. The company’s commitment to the category has been demonstrated through their development of  high capacity and superior quality data storage media, such as the IBM 3592 data cartridge (640GB/1TB) for the enterprise data storage market. Fujifilm has maintained the largest production share of LTO Ultrium tape cartridges in the midrange data storage market, and will continue to lead the development of large capacity data storage media with its BaFe technology.

“We are hopeful about bringing this technology to market and believe it will change the face of tape storage,” said Peter Faulhaber, Senior Vice President Sales & Marketing, Fujifilm Recording Media USA, Inc. “Fujifilm’s BaFe technology will make tape more attractive to IT managers; we believe that tape has the potential to be the next generation storage solution as it meets all the core needs of the market – reliability, storage density, low cost and hardware compatibility.”

In the recent technology demonstration with IBM, Fujifilm’s product performance is attributed to:

Advanced NANO Particle Technology

Fujifilm’s new technology achieved the micro-particulation of BaFe particles to 1600nm³. (approximately one-third of the current metal particle volume).

The new NANO Particle Technology inhibited the variability of particle volume by micro-particulation, generating stable super-fine BaFe particles.

Advanced NANO Coating Technology

Fujifilm succeeded in the uniform coating of a super smooth thin magnetic layer with little thickness variability to reduce noise.

By adopting a new design of magnetic surface layer, Fujifilm achieved a smooth and low-friction magnetic surface layer and reduced the fluctuation of signal output drastically; contributing to the improvement of data density.

Advanced NANO Dispersion

A new dispersed material was used to control agglomeration of micrified particles, allowing   Fujifilm to succeed in uniform dispersion of super fine BaFe particles.

NANO Perpendicular Orientation

Fujifilm realized the high-performance orientation by controlling BaFe particle at nanometer size.

Taking advantage of BaFe particle’s crystal magnetic anisotropy, perpendicular orientation achieved the higher frequency characteristics.

About NANOCUBIC and Barium-Ferrite magnetic particles

Already recognized by the industry as an enterprise-class tape solution, Fujifilm NANOCUBIC technology combines nano-scale particles, a unique dual-coating process and advanced dispersion techniques to achieve an ultra-thin magnetic layer that produces higher resolution for recording digital data, ultra-low noise and high signal-to-noise ratios that are ideal for Magneto-Resistive and Giant Magneto-Resistive heads. Fujifilm’s next-generation tape storage media applies NANOCUBIC technology to barium-ferrite particles, a naturally stable crystalline particle that does not corrode or change chemically over time, making it an optimal particle for data storage applications. Due to the crystalline anisotropy, the ultra-fine barium-ferrite particles have high coercivity for superior performance high density recording. The unique Fujifilm NANOCUBIC technology coats the barium-ferrite particles in a very uniform manner (with thickness variation of less than 10 percent across the length of the tape), resulting in a much smoother magnetic surface to significantly enhance performance.

We can all rest easy now that IDC’s storage gap may never happen.  Of course, this was probably already the case with existing technology.  Seagate reported this week shipping 50 million disk drives in Q1 2010, and nearly 100 million drives in the last 6 months.

Larry Ellison says he hates the term.  Interesting video here.  From his comments, with which I mostly agree, it doesn’t sound like the company is hot to pursue that model.

Then again, they bought Sun/STK, Virtual Iron, and are heavily invested in Pillar (though that has changed, I hear, from your typical VC investment to actual loans at this point).  Sure sounds like he wants to set up a mini-me mainframe…

My latest column for the Dutch publication, Storage Magazine:

The Insulting Thing about Clouds

“Cloud computing,” and its conceptual progeny, “cloud storage,” are great ideas. However, these concepts haven’t translated into meaningful technology so far as I can tell. In fact, much of the stuff that is being cast as “cloud” today strikes me as intellectually insulting.

Early on, cloud folk were seizing upon server virtualization marketing woo to explain what clouds were all about. Server virtualization, at least the VMware version, portends to lift application and operating system software off of the underlayment of commoditized hardware technology, thereby abstracting the hardware infrastructure. That, in turn, is supposed to facilitate more efficient resource utilization, application multi-tenancy, dynamic guest machine movement across physical infrastructure, etc., which in turn is supposed to deliver a lot of cost-containment and carbon footprint reduction goodness.

The cloud folks took just this hype to the next level: why not detach the entire IT department from the corporate organization and source all IT resources across the Web? Isn’t that the ultimate expression of the virtualization value proposition?

What the marketeers aren’t saying is that the “freedom from proprietariness” promised by virtualization-qua-clouds isn’t really freedom at all. In fact, most of the vendors have been working behind the scenes to raise proprietariness to a new level.

Look at developments at Oracle, with its pre-integrated Oracle DBMS plus Sun servers plus STK storage “solution,” or Microsoft and HP with their pre-integrated rigs, or the soon to be announced server-network-storage hardware plus software bundles from Cisco Systems, NetApp and VMware, and you see what I mean. Rather than separating software from underlying commodity hardware, these vendors are working to “enable clouds” by creating new system stovepipes (I think of them as “mainframe mini-me’s”) that are designed to lock consumers into a particular vendor cadre’s combination of proprietary hardware, software and “standards.”

The idea is that a cloud service provider will then choose one of these rigs and hitch its infrastructure to the associated vendor’s star. As the service provider adds more customers, they just add more copies of the pre-integrated “building block” rig of choice. That provides a horizontal scaling model that is cost-effective and manageable, albeit using a common proprietary management interface.

The problem with this model is that clouds from different vendors, each based on different cloud rigs, will not work and play well together. A customer who sources different services from different vendors will need to use multiple consoles to monitor SLAs and will still require the services of an IT staff to “integrate” services so they map to business processes. And, of course, whatever integration the consumer is doing is subject to failures that aren’t covered by any SLA with any cloud provider.

In theory, the adoption of clouds improves on the current IT paradigm because it eliminates the investments that companies are making in on-premise hardware and software — especially the energy and administrative labor costs associated with contemporary x86 computing. But, cloud computing is actually just an outsourcing arrangement by another name, with all of the associated problems of business process-centric management and integration of services and all the same management headaches accrued to dealing with service providers.

Ask most cloud vendors about interoperability standards and common management based on open standards like W3C Web Services and REST and you will likely get either a blank stare, or an increasingly common talking point about clouds being “too new and innovative” for standards. What it is really all about is money. Hardware vendors don’t want to eliminate proprietary hardware because it enables them to pad margins on otherwise commodity components.

Interestingly, the storage vendors are in a better position than the server folks to abstract all of the value-add software heretofore vested in array controllers into an intelligent software layer, enabling both scale independently of each other. DataCore Software, FalconStor Software, Exagrid, and several others have been doing this successfully for a decade. In DataCore’s case, they have just demonstrated that they could build Petabyte-size virtual disks from commodity storage. At the same time, they can extend the value-add features that people want to use with their storage across any set of arrays, rather than isolating value-add functions to just one vendor’s proprietary rig.

This approach seems to be closer to the realization of vendor neutral clouds than fielding a bunch of application-centric preconfigured systems designed to lock out competitors. What is needed to complete the story is an open management framework, based on Web Services, that will enable the mixing and matching of virtualized storage infrastructures from different cloud services. Anyone who says otherwise is just insulting my intelligence.

Not to be outdone by Microsoft-HP, here comes the team of NetApp, Cisco and VMware with yet another bundle of love designed, ostensibly to help weak minded geeks roll out pre-built integrated platforms for common applications rather than designing infrastructure to be separate from software layers.  Doesn’t this seem odd, coming from VMware?

Here’s a link to their online brochure.  And I guess you register there for a pitch they will be making on January 26.

About a year ago, SNIA gave us the results of a survey saying that archiving is too difficult (shades of Barbie:  “Math is hard, let’s go to the mall.”) for us poor little IT folk to do.  Steve Tongish of QStar Technologies disagreed with this finding and offered a multi-part interview about QStar archive technology, plus the presentation below of the company’s 3-2-1 Best Practice for Archiving that should be required viewing for all business IT planners.

Watch Steve’s presentation by clicking on the box above.

Be sure to visit the C-4 Project to view Steve’s entire interview.

(Apologies in advance to my Twitter followers…I have to test this out.)

This should give DrunkenData readers direct access to a video interview with Joe Marion, President of the Association of Service and Computer Dealers International (ASCDI) that has been posted on the C-4 Summit in Cyberspace Wave 2 section of the C-4 Project web page.

Joe takes us through a brief history of ASCDI, then explains how used gear and aftermarket services can take a bite out of the cost of IT during these challenging times. Worth a listen.

This is the link to open the movie:

Play the interview with ASCDI President Joe Marion here.

The decade may have ticked over, but the C-4 issues persist:  cost-containment, compliance, continuity and carbon footprint reduction continue to be Front and Back Office priorities in every shop I visit.  So, our efforts at the C-4 Project continue into the new decade. 

And we are pleased that a second wave of sponsors have signed up and been interviewed on video for posterity.  We welcome

• Tek-Tools
• Virtual Instruments
• QStar Technologies
• Spectra Logic
• TAMP Systems
• ASCDI and
• FujiFilm

to the C-4 Project and to the Summit in Cyberspace. 

We invite DrunkenData readers to watch and learn from the insightful speakers these firms have put in front of our cameras.  Most videos have been posted to the site, a couple are still in edit but will be posted shortly. 

The Wave 2 speaker videos join the hours of multimedia presentations already posted to the site from our First Wave sponsors:

• CA
• Panasonic
• Xiotech
• Xsigo
• Digital Reef
• FalconStor Software
• DataCore Software and
• e-Storm.

If I can figure out how to do it, I will post sample clips from each video here.  But, there is absolutely no charge to visit the site and to view them there.  Registration is only required if you want to participate in our community message board or post comments to the videos.

Hope some of you will visit.

Okay, so I was tricked by an email into clicking on a link to a video report about Microsoft and HP joining forces to create stovepipes for running Microsoft software on HP hardware.  See the video for yourself here.

The idea, supposedly driven by cloud computing and NOT by Oracle’s acquistion of Sun/STK (IDC goes to great pains to insist that the latter is not the motivator), is to bundle software with server, network and storage hardware managed by HP OpenView or something.  These pre-integrated systems will simplify management, according to Ballmer, and make life easier for businesses.  No word on whether the arrangement eliminates the need for patching.

Hmm.  Are preintegrated systems a good idea.  Does the market like them?  (See Verari Systems below.  See the other mini-me mainframes from Oracle, Cisco, EMC, etc.)

This doesn’t really seem like an evolution, but a devolution to me.  I generally kind of like Microsoft, but I am definitely not a big HP fan.  Former CEO Fiorina is now running for office in CarlyFornia, but no one seems to be bringing up her willingness to violate the law when she was at HP, authorizing illegal approaches to getting journalist phone records so that she could plug a leak in her boardroom. 

Anyway, I just am not convinced that this approach gets us any closer to abstracting the hardware layer from the software layer so that anybody’s gear can be used and value-add features are placed into a software middle layer.

What do you think?

Verari Systems went on the block last week, and the website has a new front end screen explaining that the assets of the company are available for competitive bid.  This struck me as a surprise for three reasons:

First, since their inception, Verari had made some impressive sales of their gear and software — combining blade servers and dense storage in a cluster configuration.  Government, prestigious healthcare institutions and others had adopted the platform that, among other things, garnered the company many lauds and awards.

Second, from my chats with users of the systems, the stuff worked pretty well.  Verari was all over its customers, as most start-ups are, custom configuring stuff, resolving any problems and adding new capabilities as needed.  It was proprietary, of course, but no less monolithic than the brand name guys are trying to build today with their mainframe mini-me’s.

Third, the company was helmed by a guy I respect and personally like, David Wright — formerly of EMC, Legato, Amdahl and IBM.  I spent some quality time with David when Legato was still Legato and was impressed by his skills in bringing that company back from the brink prior to selling it to EMC.

I hear through the grapevine that they blew through a lot of VC money and that they gave deep discounts to move systems into their primo accounts at NASA, Johns Hopkins and elsewhere.  Then, when the economy soured, they couldn’t right the black versus red ink.

I didn’t blog about them because frankly I regarded them as too proprietary.  Still, I watched to see how they did — if only as a predictor of how the purveyors of new monolith “solutions” would fare.  Given the developments, I wonder about the solvency of both the monolithic platforms coming on the market and the cloud phenom generally.

Not sure whether this is a clear indication of the future of either, or just the new rules for the old game of trying to survive an economic downturn.  I wish David and company every success going forward.

Like most of you, my 2010 experience began last Monday, January 3.  I was going to post something that day, but I was still trying to close out the books on 2009 projects.  At last those are complete, so here we go!

First, a statistic.  My fellow Americans continue to have an enormous appetite for data.  According to the latest How Much Information study, conducted this time, at UC San Diego, “U.S. households consumed approximately 3.6 zettabytes of information in 2008… corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes for an average person on an average day.”  The entire report is downloadable here.

I am waiting for some silly analyst house to start quoting this number to mean data growth within corporate organizations.  For the record, the number excludes data consumed by corporations.  We are talking kids, YouTube, Twitter, Google, Games (online and offline), digital media, etc.  Still the numbers are impressive.  We are cultivating a culture of data consumption in our home lives and the lives of our children that will likely travel with them into their working lives.  Moreover, since most of this data appears transient — or “dark” in the words of the study — we are not cultivating any sort of appreciation in the users of what is required to store, protect, or even to transport all of the bits.  This too will likely bleed over into the business world, assuming it hasn’t already.

Next, another statistic.  Mergers and acqusitions in the storage industry were significantly down in 2009:  43, compared to 69 in 2008 or 104 in 2006.  Moreover, most of the acquistions that did happen were in the storage software space, not in the hardware space.  A great article on this is available at Storage Newsletter.  What does this mean?  Is hardware now officially a commodity play and software the only real differentiator of any note?  I wonder.

Meanwhile, DataCore Software established what I think is a record at the end of 2009, creating a PB-sized virtual disk.  That’s almost big enough to store all of your purloined movie and music files from last year.

Finally, I will mention in hit and run fashion that I have been pissed off since reading a blog by Stephen Foskett last September – obviously stewing for some time.  Read his view here.  Basically, he argues that cloud storage is too new to require standards (though he tips his hat to Web Services REST in his third bullet).  Stephen, all I can say is that we went down this line of thinking in the past — with railroads and track widths.  Everyone wanted to have his own proprietary standard (see I am one of those FUD peddlers you describe) requiring a significant investment in machines to lift cars off of one set of wheels and place them on another to go between different tracks from different vendors if you wanted to go any distance.  Had there been track standards to begin with, a lot of extra cost could have been avoided — cost that diminished the revenue potential of rails despite their corporate mavens’ self-interest in keeping things proprietary.  In 2010, expect me to continue ranting about the lack of standards in clouds and how important they are to moving what is essentially a marketing concept with a limited shelf life into a mainstream technology service.

So, the New Decade has arrived and I am sharpening my knives to re-engage in the battles of marketecture versus architecture.  I hope I will provide something here that will stimulate the interest of my readers.