Storage Explosion

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This situation is made even more serious by the explosion in demand for disk space. According to META Group, Inc. (Stamford, Connecticut), storage capacity experienced 60 to 80 percent growth in 2002 and was expected to show annual growth rate continuing through 2006. Over the past year, in fact, more data has been recorded by mankind than in the entire rest of our history. To meet this demand, technology is utilizing two approaches: designing larger and larger disks and making it far easier to use more of them. The capacity of individual disk drives has already surpassed 180 GB, and IT research firm Gartner Group (Stamford, Connecticut) foresees it hitting 1.44 TB in two years. Recent developments support the belief that bigger drives and more capacity are trends that will continue for quite some time. An industry group consisting of the likes of Maxtor, Microsoft, and Hewlett-Packard has announced a new ATA interface standard called "Big Drives" that allows drives to scale up to 144 petabytes. Seagate Technologies has also developed technology that permits a single 3.5-inch platter to hold up to 125 GB, three times the current level. And, the release of Microsoft's 64-bit Windows operating system ups the ante by making it possible to manage up to 16 TB of addressable virtual memory.

In addition to more and bigger disks, they are also being compressed into smaller and smaller spaces in terms of the number of disks per square server rack. The big original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), including Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Sun, have followed the lead of, for example, nStor Technologies, Inc. (San Diego, California) in producing rack-dense servers. Take the case of the Compaq QuickBlade, which allows enterprises to fit 200 to 300 servers in a single rack, rather than the usual 42 servers.



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Server Disk Management in a Windows Enviornment
Server Disk Management in a Windows Enviornment
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2003
Pages: 197

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