At the end of 2005 our former Storage & Servers editor, Don MacVittie, must have set his time machine just a little too far into the future, because a few of his predictions are still in the queue as technologies to watch in 2007. We feel that 10 Gigabit Ethernet will still be an enabling factor for the wider adoption of iSCSI SAN storage, but the fact that IEEE took until June 2006 to produce a twisted-pair standard means that 10GbaseT ports won't actually start shipping until early or mid-2007. 10 GbE over Category 6 cabling will be a major springboard for a platform that has so far been limited to Fibre Channel or thick CX-4 copper.
We were right that SAS drive technology would start showing up in enterprise systems, and vendors such as HP, IBM and Sun now offer systems with a choice of SAS or SATA storage suited to the application. Server vendors are also beginning to embrace the 2.5-inch drive form factor, which allows more spindles--and the accompanying improved performance--to fit in the same precious real estate. Our advice about disk replication and/or CDP remains sound as well, and these technologies will continue to play a key role in disaster recovery and business continuity applications.
We were pretty cautious about blade servers and server virtualization at the end of 2005. But when we took a look at the next-generation blade systems from companies such as Sun and HP in 2006, we found a whole new level of processing capabilities, energy efficiency and midplane bandwidth that should finally produce the promised TCO improvements over conventionally racked servers. These high-density, easily managed blade solutions should fit hand-in-glove with the needs of companies looking to support a large, virtualized server environment.
Steven Hill is an NWC technology editor. Write to him at [email protected].
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