Page 10
www.us-tech.com
TechWaTch Is the Cloud Really Serving Us? By Andy Marken (
andy@markencom.com)
the dullest — storage. Oh sure, we like the new smartphones, tablets, ultra ultra HDTVs and ultrabooks they showed at CES (Consumer Elec- tronics Show) and all the bling folks come up with to personalize them; but really, without storage they just don’t work. And most of that storage is in the “cloud”. Super high video (SHV) as used
T
at Britain’s Summer Olympics, made you feel like you were right there with natural 3D imagery and 22.2 multichannel sound (talk about im- mersion!). Every step, from capture to delayed viewing required tons of storage. No wonder IDC had to up- grade the world storage require- ments from 30ZB to 40ZB (1 Zettabyte = 1,000,000 Terabytes).
Lots of Zeros Even with their overly opti-
mistic projections on the volume of content people around the globe will produce, we’re continually amazing them. Last year, they boldly said we’d produce 30ZB of content by 2020 and had to increase the volume to 40ZB this year. While a lot of it on- ly streams by and disappears, big storage buckets are still urgently
he most exciting part of the computer and consumer elec- tronics industries is also one of
needed by users, IT departments and cloud services. Fortunately, a lot of that stuff will be transient — stream- ing music/video — and will never be stored.
Even if all of the storage suppli-
ers — HD, flash, tape, optical — de- liver on Gartner’s and IDC’s opti- mistic projections, suppliers barely keep up with demand — all of it. Of course, that assumes we consumers get ours first.
Consumer Demand Desktop/ultrabook PCs have
taken a breather in sales, but the category is far from dead as some claim. For the younger crowd, tablet and smartphone usage (and replace- ment purchases) will be a higher pri- ority because of their convenience, battery life, instant connective capa- bilities. We don’t want much — 32GB on
our smartphone, 64GB on our iPad, 4800GB OWC SSD in our ultrabook, 1TB OnTheGo portable drive, two 4TB NewerTech home clouds. Haggard IT people and cloud
sellers (formerly called outsourced storage) need that storage because they not only store their stuff but they also store all that really rich, re- ally informative big data. According to IDC, that big data
JUST ANNOUNCED Now Available in Digital Format! U.S. TECH
Every Issue Delivered Directly to Your Inbox. FREE!
Great Features:
Bookmarks, highlights, notes, forward to a friend, and more.
Coming soon: U.S. TECH on your iPAD and iPhone!
Like us on Join us on Follow us on
isn’t just the average 1.8M GB of in- formation you create annually, but also that 4.1M GB of data. It proba- bly doesn’t include all of your YouTube videos, photos, social post- ings and yes, that machine-to-ma- chine data about you and everything. Of course, everyone wants to study that information — companies, re- tailers, hackers, whackers and cyber bad people.
Mixed Cloud Organizations and individuals
are shoving about almost everything they can into the cloud storage solu- tions, even though they aren’t exact- ly certain what the parameters, safe- guards and availability are. The only people who have a good handle on the situation are the people who are out to disrupt activities or borrow in- formation. But most of it just sits there untagged, unanalyzed, unused because each department has its own silo of really valuable data, and they don’t share. Even though everyone has their
own silo of your information, you don’t have to worry because most don’t have the tools or talent to han- dle all the heavy work. So, it just sits in the data warehouse until someone gets around to doing something. It probably shouldn’t bother you too much except a lot of that information isn’t protected. Whether it’s Big Data, social
media posts, video or business/gov- ernment documents and data, mate- rial is being produced and stored somewhere/anywhere in an increas- ing volume. The problem is that much of the data isn’t protected or secure, and the problem only contin- ues to grow. It’s just sitting there, naked to the world — maybe. Maybe not.
What Content? Even if you’re a big company
that has material stored in some- one’s cloud that you really want to save for legal/business purposes, it could disappear. What if you have valuable, historical content you’ve asked them to archive — keep it un- til you need it? After the first year, about 80 percent of the content that is stored — even video content and movies — is seldom accessed. It just makes you feel warm and fuzzy to know the information is there — just in case.
Storage Farms Cloud storage sounds great and
is in increasing demand. To meet the needs, enterprises around the globe are building massive cloud data cen- ters to store all the stuff. The chal- lenge/issue is that they require huge volumes of power to be instantly available, which is having a huge im- pact on our environment. Data centers, by design, run at
The Nation’s Hi-Tech Electronics Publication Subscribe today:
www.US-Tech.com
maximum capacity around the clock and consume huge volumes of energy to power and cool the systems and storage farm. According to a New
York Times investigation, digital ware houses worldwide use about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nu- clear power plants. Data centers in the U.S. account for one-quarter to one-third of that load. Fortunately, some folks are
working on that “little” problem. Facebook (a huge server/storage en- ergy user) and the OPC (Open Com- pute Project) are working on the server issues. Through crowdsourc- ing, they’ve made some great progress in setting efficiency stan- dards for scalable servers, storage and data center hardware. If anyone has a vested interest in lowering the cost of serving their one billion plus users, it’s Facebook. The challenge is to get scalable servers that work on a restricted electrical/HVAC diet. That’s a step in the right direc-
tion. In addition, cloud storage farms and IT organizations are taking a new look at the age of content and volume/frequency of accesses.
80 Percent Rule Industry analysts estimate that
as much as 80 percent of the content presently being stored is really for archive purposes — legal, financial, historical, background data and con- tent, which is kept just in case it is needed or for future monetization. Access to this information generally drops off to almost zero after a year even though it may be retained for 10 to 50 years. The key goal for most enterpris-
es is to ensure the data will be avail- able, if ever needed, at the lowest to- tal cost of ownership (TCO) possible. Most organizations use racks of hard drives out of habit — energy usage has improved. Tape is more power conservative but has other costly side effects like constant monitoring and regular migration. New optical- based power-down archive solutions provide safe, reliable, long-term con- tent storage without all of the envi- ronmental damage. They don’t re- quire A/C or power except when ac- cessed and they don’t require re- placement or migration every five to seven years. We do, however, have to under-
stand that not all data is created equal and there are trade-offs in availability and environmental impact:
Some data is mission-critical and absolutely has to be available the moment you look at the screen. l
l
can wait for it for 10-30 seconds. l
be available in 1-2 minutes. l
legal records can be requested and served up in a day.
Some data is needed, but users Some infrequently used data can Data such as patient records and
You may feel that your data/con-
tent is the most important stuff out there, but the rest of us aren’t sure that’s a cost we want to pass on to our kids. Think about it; 30 nuclear pow- er plants and growing. r
March, 2013
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100