Storage Term of the MonthThis month's definition is Open Source Software and Storage. It is a term thrown around historically as a marketing point rather than a technological development. To understand the definition, the first thing to examine is proprietary storage software. It has major advantages: To those who need the feature sets, proprietary software is always worth the investment, since applications are king in the data center. But some users of storage software want to avoid the overhead expense connected with proprietary software. This inspires users to seek out solutions that are designed and produced consistent with open sources and open standards. Open standards and open source software produce solutions that are typically, but not always, less expensive than their proprietary counterparts. The caveat is that they will not necessarily come with the same kind of after-sale service and support that proprietary packages offer. In the storage management space, the most developed open standard is the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S). SMI-S, under development by the Storage Networking Industry Association, provides a common (interoperable) extensible management transport, an automated discovery tool, and a unified object model to control storage LUNs and zones in the SAN. Barking at SMI-S' heels is StorageRevolution.com's Spider Web, a user-group designed, token-based, messaging scheme for communication between nodes in a peer-to-peer network. It is the foundation of a framework to collect information on from disk subsystems and discern how data is being generated by applications and storing that data in a common repository. Neither of these open standards are in broad deployment yet, but the day of open source is coming; there is just so much equipment out in the marketplace that standard interfaces make the issue not one of "if", but rather of "when." |
Acronis Inc. Logiciels de sauvegarde.