Evolution of Storage Media Technology Within the Data Centre

AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE EVOLUTION OF STORAGE MEDIA TECHNOLOGY WITHIN THE DATA CENTRE TO SUPPORT THE I/O REQUIREMENTS OF MODERN APPLICATIONS.

Chandan Chandapura Ramesh (x14111306)

Abstract

Technology has always played a tremendous role in evolution of data storage media from the very starting punch cards to the present flash drives and from kilobytes to terabytes. The evolution of storage included from the standardization of storage devices i.e from large trunks of kilobytes storage media to very small microchip having the great storage capacity of gigabytes. However, in this paper we will look into evolution of storage devices from magnetic tape, magnetic drum, DRAM, FLOPPY’s , CD’s, DAT, DDS, MOD, , Micro drive, Multimedia Card SD card, Cloud backup solutions. Finally, in this article about evolution about storage devices, we will look into an assessment providing solutions for tiered storage solutions and its development with reference oracle, netapp tiered storage solutions and storage based on present storage trends.

INRODUCTION

As the time passed by, along with the time technology too has evolved in every step of life from basic needs to the advanced mode of humanity. Concurrently, the evolution in technology of computers has played a prominent role for humankind. Therefore, as the storage medium has also played a major role in computer architecture. Zetta. (2015) say as the computers evolved the storage mediums too had evolved, it all started from punch cards to present storage mediums like those that flash drives to SSD, companies have started to be relied on cloud backup solutions supported by data centers.

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As per the need of today’s Business strategies the requirement for data storage has increased tremendously compared to past five years and to mitigate the costs over storage of data, it has been segregated and designed as structured, semi-structured and unstructured data and they have been stored. As the data is considered officially as corporate assets, there has always been attacks that are more vulnerable. Therefore, data hardening has been a big challenge but still many third party companies have been working towards its excellence. Few measures which have been considered under the improvisation level are SAN, Fiber channel over Ethernet (Fcoe), Internet protocol, Converged Network Adapter (CNA) etc.

The storage network technology in the datacenters has been developed into many different configurations, which are DAS (direct attached storage), NAS (Network attached storage), SAT (Storage area networks). In further section we will look this structures with much more details.

BACKGROUND:

After looking into all the prospective over the storage media briefly will have a detailed discussion over each storage model and it evolution.

Magnetic tape: PCMag digital group. (2015) say it was the first few recording mediums used to record music. The data recorded was actually in sequential format. It was manufactured by a ferromagnetic material the disadvantage of these tapes was they would be contaminated if they were not rolled and packed tightly. The tracks on storage device were running parallel to each other, which is called as parallel recording. In computing magnetic tapes are used to store auxiliary type of information. An excellent example for the computer system, which used magnetic tape, was UNIVAC. It had the capacity to handle 128 characters per inch so they were widely used in computers in earlier days.

Magnetic drum: Webopedia. (2015) it was direct access storage device, which was metallic cylinder, which was coated by a material called magnetic-iron-oxide. The tracks recorded on the cylindrical device were stored in channels and it was capable of holding 200 tracks were the drum used to rotate at 3000rpm. But still it had a drawback which is that they were not able to store too much of data.

DRAM (dynamic random access memory): it is a medium that is been used store the memory temporarily and it is been used widely in today’s computer systems. It is made up of small capacitor and transistors. Dram has many cells and each cell is equal to a Bit. The elements on Dram are organized in rows and columns. Today’s computers use these cells in megabyte modules.

FLOPPY’s: Riaz, Rashid et al (2015) say it is portable computer storage disks were data could be handled easily. They are more fragile, low at cost. It was highly dispensable for the people working on their personnel laptops and other processors. It poses a capacity of 250kb to 1.6 mb so it varies on the size of the disk.

CD’s, DAT, DDS, MOD, Multimedia Card, Micro drive, SD card were the next generation storage medias. CD-ROM was highly used to save and retrieve the data immensely on the systems. DAT was the digital recording table, which was actually released by the Sony in 1987. The main advantage is the data is recorded digitally rather that in analog style. But when compared to CD the performance of DAT is higher and advanced. Micro drives or so called flash drives are portable storage drives used to transfer small amount data very fast and efficiently and so on still the storage media has always been improvising till the present holographic storage formats and still going on giving out the services.

Evolution of technologies in Data center storage services:

Until now, we had brief discussion of different storage technologies in common IT infrastructures. SIEMON. (2015) say as the time has passed by evolution of DATA center has taken place in parallel. However, it was much more advanced as the data stored in the data center is considered as the corporate assets. so to store data securely different storage models have been introduced they are SAN, Fiber channel over Ethernet (Fcoe) , internet protocol, converged network adapter (CNA) under doff rent configurations like DAS (direct attached storage), NAS (Network attached storage), Further, in this paper will briefly look into every step of these evolution strategies.

SAN (storage area network): [6] it is a high-speed network for the storage devices, which would be connected to the servers. The main advantage of SAN is it provides great assistance in backing up the data and disaster recovery. SAN uses fiber optic cable so that the data transfer rate from one location to different location will be high.

Fiber channel over Ethernet (Fcoe): [6] it provides a great solution for the organizations possessing parallel network infrastructure issues. Fiber channel gives a high-speed data transfer protocol serially and standards for enterprise grade storage solutions, the transfer rates can be up to 10gbs. Fiber channels operate at great speeds like 4,16, 32 gb/s , but generally in IEEE 802.3ae standards the distance supported for 10GB Ethernet is 10km. so it is highly privileged in datacenters.

Internet protocol:[6] it is group or singular drive which are combined together but they are not part of storage network but considered to be more over the internal storage media on personnel laptops.

NAS (network-attached storage): [6] offers high-level storage solutions in file sharing services because the architecture is directly connected to LAN. However, because of these characters in NAS it synchronizes hardware storage resources into network, so it can be used to develop multiple networked services and by doing this storage utilization is very efficient.

So based on the above technologies the storage solutions have been improvised but still there many technological labs still working on improvement on the performance, reliability and so on.

Storage Media Solutions:

In this paper will further discuss and present an assessment on tiered storage media solution on any top two company’s depended on any context of the data at any particular time. We will be taking Netapp tiered storage solutions and Oracle tiered storage solutions.

Tiered storage solutions: TechTarget (2005) the storage solutions are to segregation of data based on the company-defined policies to reduce the cost effectiveness of the data. The segregation may include different categories like performance, usage, security and so on.

[6] Tiered storage consists few different tiers like tier 1, 2 and 3 data. Tier 1 includes highly sensitive data so data isolation is main aspect hence they are stored in expensive media solutions. Tier 2 data will consist of type two classified files so the storage media expense is reduced. In Tier 3 it consists of unclassified data the expenses are very less as the data is stored in in less expensive media.

Oracle Tired Storage Solution Service:

Oracle optimized solutions (2015) the main aim of oracle tiered solution is to provide highly efficient scalability and flexibility for the data. An always-new data storage trend was needed for better storage efficiency. As the data grows there was an opportunity arising for new wave lengths, Based on this aspects oracle offered optimized tiered solution to protect data as well, lower cost for storage and massive scalability. [3] providing Oracles disk and tape storage systems for better performance than many other storage media Introducing Oracle Storage tek modular tape gives a high throughput at lower cost and Oracle e Hierarchical Storage Manager provides configurable file system view and policy based management and data protection. They predicted that reduced deployment provides additional savings. Reduced data risk due to pretesting, ensured access and data integrity. They provide higher quality of the data availability and integrity. Oracle applies all the tiers for the data storage solutions based on the client requirements. Oracle’s StorageTek T10000D offers outstanding bit error rate. it predicts that it offers 12.6 times better TCO than EMC isilonn soln.

Netapp Tired Storage Solution Service:

NetApp (2012) has great views towards the optimizing storage efficiency and performance. The main solution they give is, the right data at the right time at the right cost. Netapp provides a very different and unique way of solution for storing the data with an automated way of approach. The virtual tier provides a real time response to most of the demanding applications, ability to consolidate the data others tiers whenever required, conducting data cloning and SSD technologies. Basically provides reduced power -cooling – storage.

The developed flash technology in the [2] storage tiers of Netapp has helped in increasing the efficiency of the storage solutions.

The key advantage of Netapp services provided for storage infrastructure will be the self-managing data-driven service layer. It helps mitigating the costs based on the performance for the classification of the data. The major feature to help the performance of the workloads would be the Netapp Flash Cache PCI-e-based modules. The workloads are like the file service workloads and OLTP workload etc…

Conclusion:

In this paper, we initially discussed about the evolution of the storage media as the time it was integrated including the storage architecture. We even took a brief review about two companies’ providing storage services which are oracle tier storage solutions and netapp tier storage solutions. we actually had a view how both the companies mitigate the storage structure difficulties and provide a wide range of solutions for the clients which is a good prospective towards the development. The tiered storage solutions of each different vendors are competitive which indirectly supporting the development of the storage technologies. The tiered storage solutions describes the different levels of the storage entities set-up with different clients based on the value of the data. So we conclude telling that the development of storage solutions has to be much more improvised based on the requirement and developments.

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