bring all these different sources into a comprehensive storage management policy. Storage has gotten so cheap; it’s in everything around us. It’s very easy to store bits in lots of places that may be hard to incorporate as part of an integrated system.

steVe Kleiman: There’s not just one answer to these problems. Look at what happens in the virus scanning world. It’s very much a belt and suspenders approach. They do it on laptops, on storage system, in networks, and on gateways. It’s a hard problem, no doubt about it.

There are a variety of technologies for outsourcing markets, such as China and India, where people who are working on a particular piece of source code for a particular company are restricted from copying that source code in any way, shape, or form. The software disables that.

Similar things are possible for the information proliferation issues we have been talking about. All these types of solutions have pros and cons and depend on what cost you are willing to pay. This is not just a technological issue or a storage issue; it’s a policy issue that also includes management and legal issues.

eRic BReWeR: In some ways it’s a triumph of the storage industry that we have moved from the main concern being how to store stuff to trying to manage the semantics of what we’re storing.

mache cReeGeR: Again, from the storage manager’s standpoint, what is he to do? What should he be doing in the next 18 to 24 months?

steVe Kleiman: Today people are saving a lot of time, money, and energy doing server virtualization and storage virtualization. Those two combined are very powerful and I think that’s the next two, three, or four years right there.

GReG GanGeR: And the products are available now. Multiple people over the course of time have talked about snapshots. If you’re running a decent-sized IT operation, you should make sure that your servers have the capability of doing snapshots.

eRic BRe WeR: On the security side, encryption. Sometimes there are limited areas where you can do the right kind of key management and hierarchies, but encryption is an established way

in the storage realm to begin to protect
the data in a comprehensive way.
ma RGo seltze R: Backup, archival, and
disaster recovery are all vital functions,
but they’re different functions and you
should actually think carefully about
what you’re doing and make sure that
you’re doing all three.
GReG GanGeR: Your choice for what
you’re doing for any one of the three
might be to do nothing, but it should
be an explicit choice, not an implicit
one.
eRiK RieDel: And the other way
around. When we’re talking about en-
ergy efficiency, being efficient about
copies, and not allowing things to leak,
then you want to think explicitly about
why you are making another copy.
eRic BReWeR: And which copies do
you really not want to lose? I differen-
tiate between master copies, which are
the ones that are going to survive, and
cache copies, which are ones that are
intentionally transient.
GReG GanGeR: For example, if you’re
running an organization that does
software development, the repository,
CVS, SVN—whatever it is that you’re
using—is much more important than
the individual copies checked out to
each of the developers.
eRic BReWeR: It’s the master copy.
You’ve got to treat it differently. No one
can weaken your master copy.

mache cReeGeR: I know that the first CAD systems were developed for and by computer people. They did them for IC chip and printed circuit board design and then branched out to lots of other application areas.

Is the CVS main development tree approach going to be applicable to lots of different businesses and areas for storage problems or do you think the paradigm will be substantially different?

GReG GanGeR: It will absolutely be relevant to lots of areas.

eRic BReWeR: I think most systems have cache copies and master copies.

GReG GanGeR: In fact, all of these portable devices are fundamentally instances of taking cached copies of stuff.

eRic BRe WeR: Any device you could lose ought to contain only cache copies.

maRGo seltzeR: Right, but the reality of the situation is that there are a lot of

portable devices you can lose that are the real copy. We’ve all known people who’ve lost their cell phone and with it, every bit of contact information in their lives.

GReG GanGeR: They have learned an important lesson and it never happens to them again.

maRGo seltzeR: No, they do it over and over again, because then they send mail out to their Facebook networks that says “send me your contact information.”

mache cReeGeR: They rebuild from the periphery.

eRic BReWeR: The periphery is the master copy; that’s exactly right.

mache cReeGeR: We’ve talked about security and storage infrastructure. We’ve touched on copyright, archival, and talked a lot about energy. We’ve talked about various architectures and argued passionately back and forth between repositories and the free cloud spirit.

Storage managers have a huge challenge. They don’t have the luxury of taking the long view of seeing all these tectonic forces moving. They have to make a stand today. They’ve got a fire hose of information coming at them and they have to somehow structure it to justify their job. They have to do all of this, with no thanks or gratitude from management, because storage is supposedly a utility. Like the lights and the plumbing, it should just work.

steVe Kleiman: They have a political problem as well. The SAN group will not talk to the networking group. The backup group is scared that their jobs are going to go away. Looking at the convergence of technologies, even for something simple like FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet), the SAN Fibre Channel people are circling the wagons.

mache cReeGeR: Or iSCSI over 10 giga-bit Ethernet.

steVe Kleiman: Absolutely. There are a lot of technical issues in there, but there are very serious people and political issues as well.

Mache Creeger ( [e-mail]) is a longtime technology industry veteran based in Silicon Valley. Along with being a columnist for ACM Queue, he is the principal of Emergent Technology Associates, marketing and business development consultants to technology companies worldwide.