In realm of big IT where I have about 13PB of backup data on deduplicated disk we didn't even look at these products. Data Domain's DD690 and 880 are overall excellent but can't compress Oracle data if their lives depended on it. At least not the ways that the DBAs like to back up Oracle. IBM's Diligent product is a fantastic piece of technology for both Open and Mainframe systems, but is VTL based and does not come cheap.

Optimized replication between sites is one of the best parts of dedupe, even over storage. If something can actually get 10x compression then that 1GbE link I have between locations functionally acts more like a 10GbE for no more cost. A huge boost on the WAN for DR.

One of the things that wasn't talked much about in the press conference was that the software heavily utilizes the GPU over the CPU when compatible hardware exists. I meant to bring it up somehow, but I was happy to be done and off camera after an hour. Media events, while interesting, require a lot of sitting still, being quiet, and not sneezing.

Yes, the technology for doing distributed computing is now over ten years old and I was a very early adopter. So as some people pointed out that's not new 'news' anymore per say. What is computationally newer is that the projects now don't just expand at Moore's law's rate anymore and as GPUs get better it will increase much faster for the next few years until leveling off at some new growth rate. Yes I know other things have been found, but finding a pulsar was really cool. Speaking with the scientists and science media all over the world and seeing the full international scope of this project over the last few weeks was also fascinating.

1GbFC? How well can this stand up to modern 8GbFC or 10GbE iSCSI?

With all of the talk about SPARC (I use and love the new 8 core SPARCs) there hasn't been an talk of Sun's StorageTek disk and tape drives. The 4GbFC, 1TB T10000K drive is critical for enterprise storage. Legacy support for 9940s and 9840s are also critical for big iron. I don't like the idea of having to move to IBM 1130s. Sun SATA JBOD arrays are excellent tier 3 storage, they can move a lot of IO for not a lot of cash. Put a Sun 5220 server (or Mx000) with multiple 4Gb FC HBAs in front of SATA using ZFS and you can build a massive data warehouse or backup system.

Why would someone just buy drives like that? If there is that large of a need for space, go buy a good array from Sun, NetApp, Hitachi, IBM, EMC, or a smaller vendor. Let them do the testing, warranty work, and integrity and let you work on your business. What do you do if you need more space than a DAS RAID can fit?

With iSCSI, FCIP, FOE, 10GbE, and FC being much cheaper/free than years ago why use DAS disk? Slice those big drives into RAID 6 and then into whatever sized LUNs you need. 5GB for a boot? Well you can fit 200 onto a RAID group. Need a 5TB Lun with good speed? Grab 1TB from several different RAID groups and have the array controller stripe for you. 8Gbs FC is out now, 2Gbs FC is really cheap with used equipment. iSCSI is pretty much free. You can even virtualize whole arrays so if you give someone 1TB and they only use 5Gb, only 5Gb is actually in use on physical disk. If you buy a deduplicating array it'll even eliminate redundant information for you depending on how you set it up.

If you value stability, flexibility, and redundancy and don't like employees wasting lots of time on hard drive testing and fixing, go buy the right tool for the job. Large arrays are also usually 'greener' since they can use drives much more efficiently if set up correctly. One 15K RPM 300GB FC RAID set at full IO load can beat hundreds of cheap SATA drives at low utilization for IO. If space is there problem then there are ways to work that too.