The latest generation of blade storage products offer data management features such as thin provisioning and data deduplication that previously have only been available in external storage systems. Also, the introduction of virtualisation technologies to blade storage systems may increase its popularity among SMBs that seek easy installation, easy administration and advanced data services features. However, blade storage products come along with some inherent limitations.
Blade storage limitations
Blade storage solutions have historically faced market resistance because of connectivity limitations, capacity restrictions and the lack of advanced storage and data management features.
“The blade form factor constrains storage, it constrains your ability to manipulate the storage. Your blade is only going to be so big; it’s only going to have so much disk space on it. It’s only going to be able to service so many clients; it’s only going to be so connected to your infrastructure, and it’s only going to have so much intelligence to manage it. It’s a pretty limiting form factor.”
said Jeff Boles, senior analyst and director of validation services at Taneja Group.
Possibly the most imposing hurdle to widespread market acceptance is blade storage’s inability to expand to meet a growing organisation’s needs.
The inability to reach beyond the boundaries of a single blade has been a huge deterrent [to blade storage adoption], Until we have more solutions in the market that can reach beyond the bounds of a single blade, we’re not going to see blade storage solutions being applied very broadly”
said Boles.
Capacity restrictions are another reason blade storage has had limited success.
When we look at storage inside the enclosure, it’s typically very purpose-driven because you have smaller capacities inside that enclosure,” said Lenore Adam, senior product manager for Hewlett Packard’s (HP’s)StorageWorks. “Typically, if you are going to have a lot of capacity requirements, you are probably going to go with external storage.
According to Adam, typical blade deployments include:
- Remote offices, such as retail outlets and enterprise branch offices
- Departmental installations, where departments are responsible for their own computing and storage equipment
- Short-term capacity expansion, where an IT department might need to get an application up and running quickly and can’t wait to integrate the application into a full-blown storage area network (SAN) or network-attached storage (NAS) environment until later
- An inexpensive tiered storage to house physical and virtual images
Read whole article here – techtarget.com
