Ben Golub gives insight to the latest storage trends including the EMC's latest acquisition of Isilon. http://blog.gluster.com/2010/11/storage-is-sexy-again/

1. The Future of Storage is Open for Business
The Revolution in Computing is Leading to a
Similar Revolution in Storage
Revolution
in
Computing
Virtualization
Standardiz’n
Multi-Tenancy
Location
Independence
Open Source
Data Explosion
Scale-out
Scale On-
Demand
Revolution in Storage
Storage must support
new computing environment
Storage will look like the new
compute environment

2. The Future of Storage is Open for Business
Implications for Storage I
• Be open source software that runs on commodity h/w
Open Source
• Provide economics, manageability, & performance that scale
with data
• Be appropriate for both unstructured data & “big data”
Data Explosion
• Flexibly and linearly scale both performance and capacity
through “small boxes”
Scale-Out
• Transparently add or delete volumes & users
• Flexibly add/delete VM Images, application data, etc.
• Do so without disrupting any running functionality
Scale on
Demand

3. The Future of Storage is Open for Business
Implications for Storage II
• If your applications, PCs, and data center are becoming files (VM
Images)…be a file based system
• Enable VM Images, application data to be accessed, managed,
backed-up…as files
Virtualization
• Run on standard hw, standard networks, standard OS
• Reduce or eliminate need for specialized hardware/tiering for different
applications, workloads, file sizes
• Don’t require application rewrite to use storage
Standardiz’n
• Don’t tie apps or users to particular physical storage
• Enable global namespaces, quotas, and partitioning of resources
Multi Tenancy
• Provide a global namespace across geographies
• Work with the public cloud as well as on-premise
Location
Independence