Terabyte Shipments

Hitachi announced shipments of their new terabyte drive this week. It is great to see the industry moving along at an impressive clip on the capacity front. However, we still need to ask questions about how to get information to and from those drives quickly and efficiently.

The news release indicated that the initial target is retail and consumers. But it won't be long before enterprise storage providers are pushed to include one terabyte drives as well. The introduction of a drive this big poses potential risks in that we're only increasing the size of the repository, but not doing much to speed up data access.

To make a quick analogy: if a disk drive or storage array were like a water well, we've only increased the size of the reservoir. But what we really need is a way to go from hand-cranking the bucket up and down to installing a large faucet for high velocity, instant-on water delivery.

Gear6 sees a promising future in complementing large data repositories with caching appliances that streamline and accelerate data delivery, going from the hand bucket to the faucet model.

We've posted numerous comments about the need to go from purely thinking about capacity to a new requirement to balance performance. A few of those posts are linked here:

The Real Story - Capacity constraints are behind us...now what
Recognizing IOPS - Understanding data delivery requirements
I/O Bottlenecks in the Limelight
Very SATAsfying