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Guy Rosen did an interesting analysis of the number of virtual machines started in Amazon’s cloud. His findings were surprising, at least to me: according to his stats, nearly 50.000 EC2 instances are started daily. But it all depends on the way you look at it; it’s less than one new VM per second. And since I know of a number of companies using EC2 instances to deal with peaks in demand, many of these will be running only a short period of time.
But today I was looking at these numbers in another way: the huge amounts of storage for these VMs. The smallest EC2 instance has 160GB of local disk storage. That means nearly 8 petabytes of storage is provisioned each day in Amazon’s cloud; and possibly more. The 160GB is for a 32-bit system; users wanting a 64-bit machine start at either 350 or 850GB of storage, so the total amount of disk provisioned just for the EC2 machines is probably over 10 petabytes per day.
 Petabox unit at the Internet Archive - by gruntzooki Photo by gruntzooki
Continue reading Amazon provisioning 8 petabytes of storage per day
I’d love to know how Amazons S3 stats looked the day after the Sidekick disaster. Did people stop trusting “the cloud”? Or are they just using cloud storage for less important stuff that they are also backing up in other places? The essence of cloud computing is trusting your cloud provider. Preston de Guise provides an excellent analysis of what this event teaches us: Continue reading Cloud storage just got a huge setback
Avere Systems has published some benchmark results for their FXT series of NAS acceleration products. At first glance, these look pretty good; the figures are based on the SPECsfs2008 benchmark. They achieved just over 20.000 IOs per second per node, with near-linear scaling of these results up to a 6-node cluster. The latter, according to Avere, “achieved a record-setting combination of 131,591 ops/sec throughput and minimal latency of 1.38ms ORT (overall response time).” Continue reading Avere Systems shows first benchmarks
After over a month of speculation and rumors, the Sun F5100 has finally appeared on Sun’s website. Most of the details published earlier were correct; in fact, the performance figures quoted earlier were lower than what’s currently being quoted by Sun.
 Sun F5100 front view Continue reading Sun F5100 finally appears
Caching for NAS and SAN systems has been a hot topic the last few days. Late last month Dataram presented their XcelaSAN appliance that sits between a Fibre Channel SAN and the clients accessing it, storing data in RAM. A couple of days ago, Avere Systems announced the FXT series of NAS caching appliances using both RAM and traditional SAS disks. And yesterday, Storspeed launched their own solution: the SP5000 NAS cache. Continue reading StorSpeed presents direct competitor for Avere FXT series caching appliances
Iomega just added a second NAS product to their portfolio that has been certified for use as a VMware storage server. Like the StorCenter IX4-200d released in August, this appliance can be used both as an NFS and iSCSI server; the VMware certification is valid for both, according to Iomega’s press release.
 Iomega StorCenter IX2 Continue reading Iomega adds smaller VMware certified NAS to their lineup
Super Talent just presented their new UltraDrive DX Solid State Drives. The drives are based on Toshiba MLC flash memory, and also use Toshiba controllers. The drives are available in capacities starting at 64GB, with the largest one providing 512GB of storage. Continue reading SSD news from Super Talent: new drives up to 512GB
Western Digital has just started what I believe will be the next trend in USB drives: a small piece of “e-paper” that can be used to label the drive. The main advantage of using the “e-label”, as they call it, is that it’s based on the electronic ink technology developed for e-readers. This means the label can be changed as often as needed just like a “traditional” LCD or LED display, but it will also stay readable when the drive is powered off.
I can see many other uses for this, but the most important one is for tape drives. Can you imagine a tape drive that uses cartridges with e-labels? Instead of using barcodes or writing your own labels, the tape unit can update the label automatically so that your tape cartridges always display the contents and date of the last backup on the cartridge. Here’s my vote for including this as a mandatory item in the next LTO standard! Continue reading Western Digital adds digital labels to My Book external drives
At this years CEATEC in Japan, TDK will provide details about their latest advancements in HDD read/write heads. These are widely believed to be the next bottleneck when improving storage density on hard disks; one of the problems when increasing the amount of data stored on a HDD platter is heat fluctuation; when magnetic storage media heat up the data stored is more likely to be erased. Continue reading TDK shows prototype of next-generation HDD read/write heads using lasers
Switch vendor Brocade is reportedly looking for prospective buyers. HP and Oracle are named as interested parties; the Wall Street Journal that first reported this doesn’t provide much additional information about why this particular moment was chosen too look for buyers. Seeking Alpha thinks the timing isn’t that good, and that they should finish integrating their Foundry Networks acquisition first. Continue reading Brocade reportedly up for sale; is Oracle serious enough to buy them?
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