Raw Storage Capacity toward the Age of Smarter Storage

December 2002 35 S torage is the computer age’s unsung technical marvel. For years, users and analysts have focused attention on the microprocessors that gave rise to the personal computer and to the networks that became the Internet. But nothing from playing solitaire on your notebook to multimillion-dollar online stock trades would be possible without storage. Without storage, a computer would not have any data to process, any applications to manipulate the data, or even the basic operating system functions to display an onscreen error message. The combination of operating system, applications, and data stored on any computer’s storage media have become a computer’s guts, providing its unique identity. The story of the computer age is, in many ways, the story of the explosion in the amount of data that can be stored in a given space and at a given price. It is also the story of how storage devices and interfaces have become increasingly intelligent. The growing computing power found in storage devices and storage networks allows tape, disk, and solidstate memory to interact more easily with a wider range of operating systems and networks. This intelligence will also help enterprise users make better use of their existing storage, reallocating unused storage space instantly and securely to meet their changing business requirements with less need for expensive storage administrators. RAW STORAGE CAPACITY As computer hardware and the operating systems that run it have increased in size and capability over the past half-century, new generations of storage devices have provided exponential increases in raw storage capacity. These devices range from the early, primitive punch cards of room-sized mainframes to the magnetic tape and magnetic disk drives of the 1950s, the optical storage and networked storage in the 1990s, and the “microdrive” and solid-state storage for today’s handheld devices. With raw storage capacity in place, the next challenge was to transfer data at higher speeds from these larger storage devices to a constantly changing variety of computer systems—each built using different internal architectures and network protocols. Overcoming this challenge meant developing storage hardware and software that could exploit increasingly robust standard interfaces, such as the Small Computer System Interface (SCSI), Fibre Channel, and the Ethernet and TCP/IP networking protocols. The simple model of hooking storage devices directly to the computer was adequate for the singleperson use of computers, as in a home PC, or when the computer functions as a single, centralized device—for example, a mainframe computer or server dedicated to a single user department or application. But when dealing with multiple distributed Adding intelligence to standard devices and interfaces has produced major improvements in storage capacity intelligence, making storage easier to manage and safeguard.