Submission + - Tape, Fibre Channel and Technology Innovation (enterprisestorageforum.com)
storagedude writes: In this meditation on why technology gets developed, the author notes that sometimes a lack of innovation can be the biggest driver of technological change, citing the case of how the slow evolution of Ethernet killed tape storage and gave rise to Fibre Channel — and how the rise of 10Gb Ethernet may finally kill Fibre Channel.
From the article:
"If 10 GbE was available at reasonable prices in 2005, we might not have seen the significant investment in dedupe hardware and software because streaming tape would have worked just fine. But the development of dedupe had another consequence: By lowering the cost of disk so it approached that of tape, it has relegated tape more and more to a deep archiving role, and that may come with its own unforeseen consequences. If tape sales continue to drop, what happens to the backup market segment that still needs tape, and what happens to the huge archiving market that requires tape — and where most, if not all, of the data cannot be deduped? And don't think of this as a small business problem — some of the biggest organizations on the planet are heavy tape users for archiving."
"Technology markets can be driven as much by a lack of innovation as they can by innovation (1 Gb Ethernet lasted far too long, opening the door for disk backup and dedupe). The commoditization of technology is another enduring trend contributing to the tenuous state of some technologies. What this means to you depends on your window for technology planning. I didn't see all the changes coming as a result of 1 Gb Ethernet overstaying its welcome, but I did recognize Fibre Channel's limitations when it failed to get placed on the motherboard despite the big "Fibre-On" push in the early 2000s. Once that happened, it was clear that Fibre Channel would someday be relegated to the back burner; the only surprise was how long it took the Ethernet folks to make that happen.
From the article:
"If 10 GbE was available at reasonable prices in 2005, we might not have seen the significant investment in dedupe hardware and software because streaming tape would have worked just fine. But the development of dedupe had another consequence: By lowering the cost of disk so it approached that of tape, it has relegated tape more and more to a deep archiving role, and that may come with its own unforeseen consequences. If tape sales continue to drop, what happens to the backup market segment that still needs tape, and what happens to the huge archiving market that requires tape — and where most, if not all, of the data cannot be deduped? And don't think of this as a small business problem — some of the biggest organizations on the planet are heavy tape users for archiving."
"Technology markets can be driven as much by a lack of innovation as they can by innovation (1 Gb Ethernet lasted far too long, opening the door for disk backup and dedupe). The commoditization of technology is another enduring trend contributing to the tenuous state of some technologies. What this means to you depends on your window for technology planning. I didn't see all the changes coming as a result of 1 Gb Ethernet overstaying its welcome, but I did recognize Fibre Channel's limitations when it failed to get placed on the motherboard despite the big "Fibre-On" push in the early 2000s. Once that happened, it was clear that Fibre Channel would someday be relegated to the back burner; the only surprise was how long it took the Ethernet folks to make that happen.
