NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: MIKE KARP ON STORAGE IN THE ENTERPRISE 08/26/04 Today's focus: Enterprise disk drives have come a long way
Dear [EMAIL PROTECTED], In this issue: * Remembering the disk pack vacuuming days * Links related to Storage in the Enterprise * Featured reader resource _______________________________________________________________ This newsletter is sponsored by Alterpoint Read the latest analyst report on Network Change and Configuration Management (NCCM) written by EMA's Dennis Drogseth. This report discusses the latest developments in the NCCM market, including an in-depth look at DeviceAuthority Suite, a comprehensive solution for configuring, changing, and controlling today's complex, multi-vendor IT network infrastructures. Download the report today to learn how you can leverage NCCM to reduce the cost and complexity of managing network change. http://www.fattail.com/redir/redirect.asp?CID=73294 _______________________________________________________________ CONTEMPLATING A CAREER MOVE? For many of us, it is time to contemplate a change. You're great at managing networks, but what about your career? Get information and advice for managing and developing your career and guiding your staff's career choices at NW Fusion's Career Research Center. Click here: http://www.fattail.com/redir/redirect.asp?CID=73224 _______________________________________________________________ Today's focus: Enterprise disk drives have come a long way By Mike Karp Over the last 20 years, enterprise disk drives have shown a predictable growth when it comes to both capacity and throughput. When I started out in this business, many IT shops had just upgraded to 360M-byte disk packs. As I recall, these disk packs contained about a dozen platters for the data, were about 18 inches high, were larger in diameter than a 33-rpm record and weighed about 30 pounds. When you walked through an IT room you saw row on row of the washing machine-sized drives that the disks worked in - and often, sitting on top of the drives, you saw what appeared to be an assemblage of large cake containers. These were the covers for the disk packs. Those of you who go back as far as this may also remember that once a week, some time during the third shift, contractors came in with special vacuums to vacuum out the disk packs, getting rid of the dust that accumulated. The disk pack vacuuming business fell on hard times with the invention of Winchester drive technology. By the time the first of these had arrived (160M-byte, rack-mounted devices - and yes, one device did take up the whole width of a 19-inch rack), it was clear that the disk pack vacuuming business was not going to be a good place for future investment. Capacity has grown, and devices have gotten quite a bit smaller over the years. Capacity growth has mostly been achieved due to significant improvements in both the media (the actual spinning disk within the drive) and the drive heads (the component inside the drive that writes and reads data to and from the disk). Advances in media technologies have allowed for increased areal density - the number of bits of data that can be stored on a square inch of the media. As aerial density has increased over the years, storage capacities have grown, while the footprint of disks has gotten smaller and smaller. Improvements in the media would have been of no value, however, if head technologies hadn't improved at the same rate; as the bits are packed closer together on the media a finer granularity is needed to ensure accurate read and write operations. New head technologies became available, of course, and head development continues to support the trend toward more data on less physical disk. Whatever growth was enabled by improvements to the heads and media, however, would have been of limited value if we didn't at the same time come up with faster ways to move data between the disks and the applications that use it. In the next several columns, we will look at what has been done to improve data throughput, paying particular attention to the evolutionary trend toward serial I/O interfaces. It turns out that these not only offer increases in speed, but also quite a bit else. _______________________________________________________________ To contact: Mike Karp Mike Karp is senior analyst with Enterprise Management Associates, focusing on storage, storage management and the methodology that brings these issues into the marketplace. He has spent more than 20 years in storage, systems management and telecommunications. Mike can be reached via e-mail <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. _______________________________________________________________ This newsletter is sponsored by Alterpoint Read the latest analyst report on Network Change and Configuration Management (NCCM) written by EMA's Dennis Drogseth. This report discusses the latest developments in the NCCM market, including an in-depth look at DeviceAuthority Suite, a comprehensive solution for configuring, changing, and controlling today's complex, multi-vendor IT network infrastructures. Download the report today to learn how you can leverage NCCM to reduce the cost and complexity of managing network change. http://www.fattail.com/redir/redirect.asp?CID=73293 _______________________________________________________________ ARCHIVE LINKS Archive of the Storage newsletter: http://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/stor/index.html Breaking storage news and analysis: http://www.nwfusion.com/topics/storage.html _______________________________________________________________ FEATURED READER RESOURCE WONDERING IF YOUR PAY IS UP TO SNUFF? Check out Network World's 2004 Salary Calculator to see if you're getting paid what you're worth. Using data collected in the 2004 Network World Salary Survey, we've programmed this calculator with several categories that could affect your pay. Answer the questions and find out what the average salary is for your job category. 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