Storage: caught between a rack and a hard drive

Enterprise storage clouds are a breathtaking accomplishment of terabyte upon terabyte of redundant, failover-ready, disaster-recoverable critical data.

Some of the most important day-to-day data spends its entire life on very tangible whirring, clicking and grinding storage devices attached to a PC. That's where the most significant storage changes are coming.

The first, and potentially most important, change is a subtraction rather than an addition.

For years, Windows PC makers have complained about floppy drives in the same way that they might complain about the weather and have been unable to do anything about it.

As a relatively inexpensive component, desktop builders gnashed their teeth and stuck with it. Now Dell has announced that it's removing the floppy as a standard component on its upcoming Dimension series, after already eliminating the drives in its laptops.

Some see the move as opening the door to finally purging the drives from the mainstream.

"We'll have USB-attached floppy devices. It'll still take four to five years before the floppy completely disappears, but PC makers are under pressure to eliminate the cost and space it takes up," said Mark Margevicius, research director at Gartner.

Not everyone is ready to declare the floppy drive a lost cause, however.

"I sell more floppy drives than I did a year ago, so it's still in demand," explained Eddie Moore, European business manager at Ideal Hardware.

Media manufacturing giant Imation noted that, while floppy disk volumes were down about 15 per cent last year, it only recently phased out the ancient eight-inch disk, so there's no need to stock up on 3.5 inch disks in fear of a world shortage.

But don't look for a resurgence of the touted floppy replacement technologies such as 3.5 inch magneto-optical, SuperDisk, or Iomega Zip. Despite Iomega's recent upgrade to a 750MB Zip format, those formats remain very narrowly focused and are largely installed-base phenomena.

"It's fair to say that both SuperDisk and Zip have failed in the long term," said Marcus Heap, business development manager at Imation, which produces the 120MB SuperDisk format.

Despite the fact that SuperDisk mechanisms support standard PC or Mac floppies, the cost of the drives never justified their widespread adoption.

More importantly, their media remained too expensive to give away or lose, which is the major draw of floppies and now plain CD-R disks, which both cost mere pennies.

"Floppy is still around, much to our surprise," said Michael Schwend, network attached storage (Nas) pre-sales manager at Iomega.

Since Iomega couldn't remake low-end removable media in its own, patented image, the company has tied its future to the Nas market, jumping in with both feet with mid-range products that include dual Ethernet interfaces and gigabit Ethernet expansion capability.

That doesn't mean Zip is dead, but it isn't running sprints any longer, either. "We have an installed base of millions, and still sell a lot to people who now organise and archive their data on Zip disks," explained Schwend.

Visibly optical
While removable magnetic media goes further into decline, the future for desktop optical continues to brighten. "We believe the optical format will remain the leading technology for everyday data transport and exchange," said Heap.

CD-Rom became a no-brainer when its impressive data capacities (initially 650MB, now 700MB) became the main method of choice for software and data distribution, and the CD-R and RW formats have become similarly inescapable.

Write-enabled desktop drives cost virtually the same as their read-only counterparts, and in the notebook world, with more limited configurations, onboard CD-RW drives are now commonplace.

"Even if people don't want to pay for the CD-R/W drive, if you buy a laptop, you get it anyway," pointed out Steve Kenniston, technology analyst at Enterprise Storage Group.

What's more, CD stands on the verge of completely replacing floppy functionality. PCs have supported CD boot for years and the industry is putting the finishing touches on the Mount Rainier standard for interactive CD-RW access that mimics traditional magnetic media.

Software solutions such as Ahead Nero InCD already exist to take advantage of the concept, which eliminates the need to go through the usual master-burn-wait process for writing CD data.

Still to come is enterprise desktop acceptance of DVD-Rom and writeables. "DVD is still associated with entertainment and you won't see it a lot in a pure enterprise environment," insisted Schwend.

In fairness, DVD-Ram enjoyed some early success, in part due to its sombre caddy format which no one could mistake for a film.

Uncertainty over the outcome of the DVD-RW and +RW format war has also slowed adoption. While no clear winner or surrender has yet been declared, Sony is shipping a dual-format drive, with NEC due to follow in April.

That said, the +RW format is clearly favoured by hardware makers. While DVD vendors are anxious to declare the death of the CD-R format, the truth is that 700MB remains a formidable amount of data, and DVD media is not as disposable.

Imation foresees a slowdown in CD-R sales growth, but still expects double-digit improvements for at least the next year.

Although optical and tape will forever fight it out in the high-capacity backup and library space, the next big move in optical technology is expected to be driven not by industry (already slow to embrace DVD) but by consumers.

"The industry has a need for a DVD recording device that can capture HDTV bit rates, so it had to come out with blue/violet laser and at least 20GB disks," said Moore.

Most major industry players are looking at the Blu-ray Disc format, a caddy-based optical disk with 27GB per side.

In parallel, NEC is working on a blue/violet-laser based format with slightly less capacity than the Blu-ray spec, but which preserves backward compatibility with older optical media.

CD has withstood the test of time and is unlikely to go quietly because, little by little, it has profoundly affected the way data is stored, published and disseminated, with no compatibility-breaking changes to the format in the interim.

"CD became a computer technology in 1985, and if you take a CD-Rom from 1985 and read it today, you should be able to read the data, unless it's in a proprietary database format," explained Moore.

My enemy, my ally, my hard disk
Although many in technology management would love nothing more than to strip out local storage entirely, or limit disk space to just enough to boot the operating system, the fact is that as long as disk remains on the desktop, it will offer a lot of spare room.

Both the consumer segment and the storage appliance business see to that, because the drives will continue to be the same across all of those applications for some time to come.

"IT people are saying: 'Give me the smallest, cheapest, dumbest drive [for the desktop] because I need to manage the data sprawl that's going on.' But I don't think Maxtor or Western Digital or Seagate are going to separate their businesses into enterprise and consumer segments so that growth inside the PC will continue," said Kenniston.

Stuart Gilks, system engineering director at Network Appliance, said: "We've moved from 9GB to 140GB as a standard disk size over a very short time."

However, to make those major capacity leaps, other areas had to receive less attention. "The performance of a raw individual drive has maybe doubled in that time," he added.

The cautious emergence of Serial ATA (SATA) is meant to address that, at least in part, with a streamlined interface with fewer than 10 wires and a peak speed of 150MB per second.

Stephen DiFranco, vice president of corporate marketing at Maxtor, defended the relatively minor step up from the current ATA-133 interface.

"The value proposition for SATA has more to do with the PC than it does with the hard drive; a simpler integration, a smaller cable and better airflow," he explained.

DiFranco agreed that the ease of deploying SATA Raid and dropping disk prices could make it attractive for PC makers to offer built-in redundant fail-over inside the desktop itself.

"We're hearing from the white box market that there's demand to do that," he said. "In many ways that's more affordable than to try to put in a [backup] infrastructure."

With both falling prices and a shrinking universe of drive manufacturers, no one is eager to promise the next leapfrog in drive performance.

DiFranco warned that drive makers can't get too complacent, however, due to pressure from the system builders. "What pushes the envelope isn't our competitors as much as the distribution channel: the Dells of the world," he said.

You can take it with you
Between the desktop drive and the network attached storage (Nas) rack are portable external hard drives, a unique pairing of blessing and curse.

The easy connections via USB or FireWire mean minimal or no driver install, and the alternative - tearing down or replacing a machine just to increase disk capacity - is expensive and inefficient.

But they also represent additional data sprawl and an even easier-to-misplace data loss risk than laptops.

"If the IT guy is worth his salt, rather than buying everyone in the company a portable hard drive why not mount a Nas unit? The pricing is about the same," argued Kenniston.

He makes an exception for push-button-backup lines of drives from companies such as Maxtor, which Kenniston advocated as an offsite mechanism for telecommuters.

"If I can provide a [backup] tool at home without transferring over wire, it cuts administrative IT costs," he explained.

Things are much tidier in the enterprise storage cloud. But as long as data needs to be created by individuals and moved quickly from point to point, there'll be an important and wide range of evolving storage technologies at the desktop level.

Small blocks, big storage
Some of the most impressive and portable storage opportunities on the desktop come from the once-tiny flash memory camp.

Solid state modules such as USB keys, CompactFlash and SecureDigital don't offer the dramatic price/storage ratio of magnetic media, but they have cracked the gigabyte barrier and have solid support at the OS level, in particular USB keys, which are plug-and-play on any modern Windows or Mac PC, with no hardware requirements aside from a free USB port.

Dell plans to substitute a 16MB USB key for the floppy drive as part of its transition, for example.

Despite pricing that's far better than it was when tiny, when expensive CompactFlash cards first showed up in the digital cameras and PDAs of the late 1990s, the realities of integrated circuit production make them far more expensive than a thin sheet of plastic and film such as a CD-R.

"If you need to transport data between the desktop and a wireless, they're great devices," said Moore. "But they're too costly to give away."

As a real-world technology, their usefulness is hard to ignore, but they're not likely to become standard issue, approved corporate equipment, even with the sidelining of the floppy.

"You'll see executives with them, plugging it into a laptop as they step up to give a Powerpoint presentation," suggested Kenniston. "But I don't see it hanging around for a long time."