News Blog

Solid-state disks, which use flash memory instead of spinning magnetic platters to store data, may have just won an endorsement from a demanding, high-prestige customer: Google.

According to a Monday report in DigiTimes, Google is using Intel SSD technology combined with Marvell controller chips in servers at the company's headquarters. The technology is due to ship late this quarter, the report said.

SSDs offer energy consumption and performance advantages over conventional drives, but they can't match the earlier technology on capacity so far. Google, with thousands of servers, is very sensitive to all those issues.

Given the increasing maturity of SSDs, it would be surprising if Google weren't testing them. What's unclear is whether the company is planning some broad deployment of the technology. A couple sources I've run this past have suggested the report is off base, though.

It's interesting to note that it appears from the report that Google appears to be buying raw ingredients more than finished products. Google is famous for building and maintaining its own hardware and software.

Google, Intel, and Marvell didn't comment on the report.

Mosso, the cloud computing division of hosting provider Rackspace, plans to add online storage to its menu of services later this year.

The storage service, called CloudFS, is available to a limited number of customers in a closed beta test and will enter more a more widespread public beta test sometime later this year, the company said.

Developers and businesses can sign up to take part in the initial beta service now.

CloudFS gives developers access to almost unlimited amounts of storage for 15 cents per gigabyte, including replicated copies of backed-up data.

(Credit: Mosso)

Mosso in February launched an online service called The Hosted Cloud that so far offers e-mail hosting and managed hosting services.

As Gordon Haff wrote at the time, Mosso takes a slightly different approach than other online service providers:

The core concept behind Mosso's Hosting Cloud is that many Web-based applications or sites are built up using largely common stacks of technologies such as PHP and MySQL databases. Mosso takes advantage of this fact by providing the means to provision applications running on one of these common stacks. Mosso is effectively offering cloud computing at a level of abstraction more akin to that of a Web hosting provider.

Haff notes that "Mosso takes care of patching and updating the operating system and other software stack components...it's a bit different than what's generally discussed in the context of cloud computing."

CloudFS will be accessible via the REST Web services API, and language-specific APIs such as those supported by .Net, Java, PHP, Ruby and Python, the company said.

Seagate has come a long way in the data storage business, from its 5MB ST506 hard drive in 1979 to its latest 1TB Barracuda introduced last year. And today the company announced that it is the first manufacturer to ship 1 billion hard drives.

If you can't visualize that many storage devices, picture this: You can circle the globe 13.7 times with the 1 billion hard drives placed end-to-end, according to Seagate.

(Credit: Seagate)

Not all of them bear the Seagate brand. The number also includes the ones manufactured by Conner, which merged with Seagate in 1996, as well as those from Maxtor, which was acquired in December 2005.

More noteworthy, however, are some of the other statistics behind the accomplishment. For example, the first 5MB drive--the Seagate ST506--weighs a hefty 5 pounds and cost $1,500 when it debuted in 1980. A 3.5-inch 1TB drive today, which has 200,000 times more capacity, retails at only a fraction of that cost.

Another interesting fact: It took Seagate 17 years to ship the first 100 million drives, but only 12 years to make the next 900 million.

What's scary is that Seagate expects to hit the 2 billion milestone within the next 5 years, based on current increases in production capacity and demand. That looks like a very possible scenario, considering the amount of data we guzzle daily with no signs of slowing down.

At its press event, Seagate also did a little crystal-ball gazing, predicting that higher broadband penetration and rapid growth in digital content will increase market demand for hard drive storage by almost 80 percent by 2012. But the company has played down the impact of solid state drives (SSDs) on traditional disk-based devices, believing instead that hybrid drives will be more affordable for most consumers. The company will still be involved in the SSD business though, with its first product expected later this year.

(Source: Crave Asia)

STEC issued a formal response Tuesday to a patent infringement lawsuit filed by rival storage maker Seagate Technology and its subsidiaries.

STEC, which responded to the lawsuit Seagate filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, says it will "aggressively" defend itself against Seagate's four patent infringement claims and contends it was one of the first companies to develop, manufacture, and ship high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs), predating the patents cited in Seagate's complaint.

Seagate is alleging STEC violated four of its patents relating to its SSDs, memory-backup systems, and self-testing systems for devices, according to a report in MarketWatch.com.

STEC, which said it has been shipping SSDs as early as 1994, said it plans to review the patents cited in Seagate's claims to determine whether any of its patents had been violated.

"STEC believes it held such technology including prior patents, dating more than a decade prior to any of Seagate's patents," STEC said in its response.

STEC alleges the Seagate lawsuits take aim at its Zeus-IOPS technology, a new line of SSDs targeted toward the enterprise storage market. SSDs competes against hard disk drive technology. Some storage makers like Samsung are looking to straddle both worlds. Samsung has said it has no plans to pit mechanical hard drives against solid-state flash drives.

Updated at 2:30 p.m. PDT with comments from Iomega Chief Executive Jonathan Huberman.

And now for something completely different.

Software and storage company EMC announced Tuesday that it will purchase Iomega for $213 million, or $3.85 per share. EMC expects the deal to close sometime during the second quarter of this year.

EMC has traditionally played in enterprise-level storage and software arenas. Iomega is best-known for hard drives and storage for consumers and small-business customers. EMC hinted that this is just its first move into consumer hardware business.

"Iomega will play a key role in EMC's strategy to expand our information storage and management capabilities deeper into the high-growth consumer and small business markets," EMC Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Joe Tucci said in a statement.

Iomega says the acquisition by the larger EMC will enable the company to grow in a way that it currently cannot. "Our markets are adjacent, but not overlapping," Iomega Chief Executive Jonathan Huberman said in an interview with CNET News.com Tuesday. "We have strong brand and channel presence in business and consumer (markets), but what we do lack is scale."

Iomega earned $336 million in sales in 2007, while EMC did more than $13 billion in sales worldwide last year.

Once the acquisition is complete, Huberman will lead the newly minted consumer/small-business products division in EMC's storage platforms group. The division will be built completely around Iomega people and brands. Huberman said no decisions have been made on possible staff cuts at Iomega. "But the expectation is that this is about growth," he said. "The vast majority will be coming into the new organization."

Huberman said a major opportunity for his company at EMC is to take advantage not only of its scale and channel partnerships, but its intellectual property, particularly in the area of networked storage products.

EMC has been on anacquisition tear during the last few years, most recently snapping up Pi, a cloud-computing start-up.

A few years ago, servers based around Linux and Intel or Advanced Micro Devices chips decimated the market for high-end Unix servers.

The same thing is about to happen to in the storage market, says John Fowler, executive vice president of systems at Sun Microsystems. And this time, Sun hopes to be one of the beneficiaries of the trend, not one of the victims.

"Open storage is going to be one of those big changes events for that part of the industry," he said. "The storage marketplace is almost identical to the server market of 10 years ago. High-end storage arrays have proprietary hardware, proprietary silicon, and often proprietary silicon sold at very high margins."

Sun's John Fowler

(Credit: Sun Microsystems)

Incumbents like EMC and Network Appliance, however, won't likely give up easily. NetApp and Sun, in fact, are embroiled in a nasty lawsuit over Sun's ZFS file server, which Sun believes will play a crucial role in lowering the price of storage. And, truth be told, Sun has tried for years to break into the upper echelons of storage for years with middling success. In 2005, it spent $3 billion for StorageTek.

Still, standards often have a way of winning. The forces driving the change in the storage market are multicore processors, interfaces like SAS (Serial Attached SCIS) and open-source (or at least easily available) software. Standardization will cause storage systems to drop rapidly in price, Fowler said. Instead of being confined to centralized computing rooms, departments are going to be able to buy their own data storage units.

"It will be like the PC revolution," he said.

A shift toward open storage systems is already occurring in high-performance computing environments and research labs, Fowler said. Large Web sites and huge data centers shouldn't be too far behind, he predicted. Sun's initial foray into open storage was the Sun Fire X4500, a server with a lot of storage capacity, running OpenSolaris and ZFS.

As the price drops, hardware makers will also experiment with adding features on higher end machines. Sun, for instance, is working on a system that contains a cache of flash memory for rapid data access. It will function in a similar way as a hybrid hard drive, but, because it is a complete storage system built from several drives, it will have more capacity.

Although storage isn't the kind of topic that can usually perk up a dinner party, large companies are also dedicating more research and development to storage these days. Faster memory devices and complex file systems are some of the primary avenues of research at IBM's Almaden Research Center.

"The problems we're looking at aren't computationally driven per se, but more information management problems," Mark Dean, an IBM fellow and director of the Almaden Research Center, said in a recent interview. "Computation is not the hard part anymore."

At Sun, co-founder and chief computer architect Andy Bechtolsheim spends a substantial amount of his time on storage issues.

Standards is the new mantra at Sun. During the '90s, it raked in billions in revenue in selling Solaris servers with UltraSparc chips. Former CEO Scott McNealy used to talk about how there was a battle between Microsoft and the rest of humanity (with Sun being the defender of humanity.) Sun would sell some servers with Intel and AMD chips, but not enthusiastically.

When the dot-com crash hit, several of the start-ups that Sun sold gear to ended up selling the expensive machines they got from Sun on eBay. Now, Sun spends its time trying to woo customers with MySQL, the open-source database Sun bought. The strategy now is to convince customers that Sun can assemble standardized components and software better than others.

Besides, "EMC versus the rest of humanity" doesn't have much of a ring to it.

SAN JOSE, Calif.--Samsung will immediately begin shipping two new high-capacity hard drives Tuesday, but it also is betting heavily on solid-state drives.

The company gave details regarding its storage business at a press event here, and also gave a good indication of how it sees its fortunes unfolding over the next few years. Samsung shipped 13,052,200 hard drives in the fourth quarter of 2007, which puts it in fourth place behind industry leader Seagate, which shipped 49,595,000 last quarter, according to IDC.

The first new drive is a 2.5-inch, 500GB--or half a terabyte--hard-disk drive (HDD) for notebook PCs. That is achieved with three separate platters, or discs where information is stored, that fit 167GB each. It has what has become regarded as a mainstream spin speed of 5,400 revolutions per minute. Fujitsu announced its own 500GB drive last week, but it has a slower spin speed of 4,200 rpm.

The Samsung drive's form factor, a slim 9.5 millimeters high, means it will fit into the increasingly slimmed-down notebooks vendors are turning out. Making hard drives that can easily work with a variety of slim PCs could mean more potential customers for Samsung. But it's not just for consumer notebooks. Samsung says this could also work in digital video recorders, next-generation game consoles, and external hard drives for personal storage.

The company also announced a 2.5-inch 250GB HDD. It has a lower capacity, but better performance with a rotation speed of 7,200 rpm.

While it continues to push high-capacity hard drives, Samsung clearly wants it both ways. Jon Kang, president of Samsung Semiconductor, which is the division of the company responsible for chips and storage, said HDD, optical drives, solid-state drives, and hybrid (a combination of HDD and SSD) drives, "will continue to exist." Further, the company has no plans to pit mechanical hard drives against solid-state flash drives, Kang said.

That was clear in the emphasis the company put on its 64GB SSD product that is showing up in some recently announced machines from top PC vendors. The ruggedized Dell XFR D630 announced Tuesday uses it, as does the Dell XPS M1330, the Alienware Area 51 m9750 (it uses two of them), and Lenovo's new ThinkPad X300.

Samsung is "really excited" that Alienware, Dell, and Lenovo laptops come packed with this 64GB SSD.

(Credit: Samsung Semiconductor)

A few consumer notebooks come with options for SSD today, but that's going to change. Samsung expects that the market share of solid-state memory will go from 1 percent used in PCs to 27 percent over the next three years. That's why Samsung is particularly stoked about Lenovo's X300, a superslim ultraportable that comes with its SSD standard, not just as a more expensive option. Jim Elliott, vice president of memory marketing for Samsung, called the X300's debut a "hallmark event" for computing where soon more and more solid-state drives will be configured into notebook platforms, not as an afterthought configurable option.

"We expect this to be the beginning of a trend," Elliott said.

And though 64GB SSD is what's available now, but he did say that 128GB SSD will be available to a few PC manufacturers by midyear.

Sun Microsystems continues to run amok in the open-source world, open-sourcing software in every direction. Today, it is in the direction of digital-archiving software, which has been used to capture and maintain "business images, records, consumer- and corporate-created digital content, e-science work, and high-performance computing (HPC) data for hundreds of years."

How does Sun expect to make money? In this case, it's the hardware, which makes a lot of sense:

A few days ago, David Strom wrote an article in The New York Times about making off-site file backups over the Internet. There is no one right answer when it comes to making backups, but I'd like to expand on a few points he raised.

At the beginning of the article, Strom says that "for a few hundred dollars a year you can buy inexpensive protection." Hopefully, readers weren't scared off by the price. Many off-site storage companies will hold backup copies of your files for much less money. Personally, I started out paying $10 a year for 1 gigabyte of off-site storage. Now, I pay $20 a year for 2 gigabytes.

Mozy is one of the off-site storage companies mentioned in the article. I wrote a two-part review of Mozy back in July. Perhaps the most important point about Mozy is that it will, at times, delete your backup files. Anyone who mentions Mozy and leaves out this fact has not done their homework.

The sentence in the article that most prompted this posting was this:

"It's a good idea to try out a service to see how long it takes to make a complete backup of each computer you want to protect."

Off-site storage is not the appropriate medium for complete backups of a computer. Off-site backup is only appropriate for your important files. For most broadband users, uploading large files is slow, drastically slower than downloads (the exceptions being fiber, SDSL and T1 connections). And the cost of off-site storage usually increases with the amount of data stored.

Strom warns that "in some cases, the first backup will take hours, if not days." If it takes you days to make a backup, take it as a hint you're barking up the wrong tree. Complete backups, those that include the operating system and applications, are best done with a disk imaging program to an external hard disk or DVDs. Fedex is what I suggest for any complete backups you might want to store off-site.

Features and services

In choosing an off-site storage company, software that automates the backup process may sound like a good thing, but there is a downside--automation can go too far. Last year, Business 2.0 magazine almost didn't publish an issue because they lost all their files. Their automated backups were a bit too automated; the backups hadn't been running and no one noticed.

Many file storage companies provide you with software. Just say no. For one thing, using their software makes it harder to switch companies in the future. Also, there is no way to have real security if the same organization is both encrypting your files and storing them. Finally, it may limit you when it comes time to restore files, and, in your hour of need, that's the last thing you'll want to deal with.

Any off-site backup company should let you upload and download files from any computer connected to the Internet, using nothing more than a Web browser. Not all do. Charging customers based on the amount of data being stored is eminently fair. Charging based on the number of computers those files came from, strikes me as a rip-off.

Finally, anyone considering off-site backups for the first time should read Ed Foster's article, "Backup Service EULAs Warrant a Closer Look," from last February in which he discusses the End User License Agreement from Mozy, Iron Mountain, Carbonite, Xdrive, and SOSonlinebackup. Even expecting the worst, it's shocking.

So few people back up the files on their computers; you don't want to start off on the wrong foot.

See a summary of all my Defensive Computing postings.