![]() ![]() When you go to restore, you're usually coming back off of tape, unless the backup image in question is sitting in the disk cache. They use disk as a cache - they buffer the incoming backup streams, do some housekeeping and stacking, then turn around and write tape efficiently. Disk LibrariesĪs many of you know, VTLs have been around for a while. And there was real work involved getting all of this set up in large, complex environments.īut I kept thinking - what about direct replacement of tape? What about being able to use these pATA drives as a direct tape substitute? No muss, no fuss? Sure, you had to think through just how you did it, as the performance of the pATA drives could become an issue if you weren't a bit careful. There was another school of thought that we could just use snaps and clones to back up applications. Most backup-to-disk to a file system was bottlenecked by the LAN used to reach it, and we knew that pATA drives brought speed to the party, as compared to tape. But, as we talked to users, we realized that this was nice, but was hardly compelling. configure a big file system, and point your backup app at it. There were certain backup packages that knew how to use disk as a target, e.g. So that was one.īut as we thought about using pATA drives for backups, it became obvious that there was no one "right answer" to how they might be used. ![]() We had seen success using parallel ATA drives in EMC's Centera, and we knew the access patterns well. The obvious use case is to use them for data that's not frequently accessed - archives, for example. So we spent a lot of time thinking about potential use cases for this decidedly different storage medium. Sure, there was now the ability to provide lower cost (and lower performing) capacity mixed and matched as part of a CLARiiON, but there were concerns.ĪS an example, what if people put the wrong kind of information on it, and had sub-optimal performance? (Turned out this didn't happen too often, most people understood that the pATA disks didn't offer the level of performance of the FC drives, and, if they made a mistake, it only happened once!). The product marketing team was wrapped around the flagpole a bit trying to figure out the pros and cons of this innovation. The cost per megabyte was extremely attractive - and, if they were used in the right way - it was easy to see that it'd be a pretty popular offering. It looked that we would have a nice lead in the marketplace in offering pATA disk economics in an enterprise-class FC array such as the CLARiiON. The engineering team had figured out a clean way (using a clever bridging adapter) to get parallel ATA disk drives to work seamlessly in a FC-based CLARiiON. We were hotly debating the pros and cons of ATA disks in the CLARiiON. It's always hard recreating context from the past - technology moves so quickly that people forget and assume that things always were the way they are now.īack in 2003, I was the product marketing guy for EMC's storage group. ![]() Parallel ATA Drives Become Viable For Enterprise Storage in 2003 ![]()
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