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| gilder.com |
April 13, 2001
Anyone out there still remember the first Telecosm conference, somewhere
out there on the edge of the Mojave desert, five long, long years ago this
summer? More than a whiff of that pre-deluvian spirit was in the air this
week at Storewidth 2001, the new kid on our conference agenda, wherein
bits collided with bandwidth in the ancien Pacific splendor of the
Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel. The frontier moves up.
The radiant heat surprised us as much as anyone--blistering start-ups,
smug VCs, and enough 10-20-30X charts to distract everyone from the
Nasdaq's display of what look unmistakably like signs of intelligent life.
Our part in giving the market a bottom? Read the highlights from Gilder
Technology Report analyst Brett Swanson, and decide for yourself.
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LIVE FROM LAGUNA/Bret Swanson
Opening night. A packed room just listened to George talking lambda
lightwaves, and then heard Akamai's Avi Freedman and Mirror Image's Bob
Hammond debate the Internet. They are confused. They thought this was a
storage conference.
Why aren't we here to celebrate the storage industry's amazing feats?
After all, disk storage prices have declined by a factor of 30,000 over
the last four decades. In just the last five years, magnetic disk storage
has plummeted from $325 to $15 per gigabyte. After years trailing Moore's
Law, storage performance is now doubling every year.
The answer is that bandwidth is growing even faster. To succeed in the new
era, disk drive makers, NAS and SAN vendors, server suppliers, and
software developers, need to focus on one simple truth. Storage isn't the
killer app-the Internet is. Avi Freedman gamely called his speech
"Debunking Storewidth." Assuming the Internet will remain full of
narrowband links and peering politics, Akamai conserves all the bandwidth
it can. If there were no Avanex or Corvis, those supersmart IP networking
skills would reign supreme. But as Bill Joy says, photons have a way of
tunneling through software and router and edge-cache complexities. Mirror
Image's centralized approach looks better than ever.
EMC executive chair Mike Ruettgers opened the day in his perennial role as
storage giant--just hours before his company downgraded its outlook. His
big picture numbers are always compelling-EMC sees the server and PC
market growing 6 percent annually over the next four years, networking 8
percent, IT as a whole 11 percent, and-drum roll please--storage twice
that. What he didn't explain was how EMC can ride that wave if it stays
behind the enterprise wall.
Geoff Barrall of BlueArc rolled out even bigger numbers, claiming 10 times
the data throughput and 30 times the storage capacity of "Vendor E" and
"Vendor N." Mike Ruettgers was already gone, but Net App's Keith Brown
said, in effect, "We'll see you in the market" Brown also joked that B2C
means "Back to Cleveland"-- all those Midwesterners who made it to the
Valley just in time for the dot-com crash.
Yotta Yotta, a Seattle company with parallel supercomputing roots, made a
splash announcing that its first beta boxes shipped Wednesday. We want a
lotta lotta more specifics. Tie-dyed Mangosoft advisor and former Compaq
Fellow Richie Larry got the mega metaphor prize with his image of a 747
flying at 50 million miles an hour, a fifieth of an inch off the ground,
while the pilots calmly read the number of dots on a domino below. That's
a state of the art disk storage head. Another star presenter was Dick
Watts of Scale Eight, whose elegant architecture is pure Storewidth. From
the sound of it, Scale Eight and Mirror Image are dating, with Exodus the
match-maker. It's a great pair.
Storewidth Extra Credit: Can you translate the following sentence (a
recent question posed in an InfoStor interview)? "Is EMC's attempt to get
a VI spec for NFS/CIFS adopted by SNIA related to DAFS, or an attempt to
split the whole DAFS initiative?"
A lot easier to digest was Western Asset's superb economist Scott Grannis,
whose lunchtime talk poked hole in Fed accounting-anyone ready to believe
that service sector productivity has been negative over the last 30 years?
Dumb networks, stupid storage is the heart of storewidth paradigm. When
the GTR a year ago forewarned the death of Fibre Channel, the industry
laughed. But In Laguna this week, Gigabit Ethernet and IP were the
unabashed belles of the ball. New paradigms don't add complexity; they
subtract it. Most of the storage industry still doesn't get it.
StorageNetworks CTO Bill Miller summed it up: "If storage is kept the
same, by 2046 the cost of storage will exceed the GDP of the world." To
solve the expensive and growing crisis of "smart" storage, he believes
storage needs to be self-organizing. "Networks need to put stuff where it
should."
BlueArc's Geoff Barrall added another note: conventional microprocessors
cannot do the job. To keep up with bandwidth and the parallel streams of
the fibersphere, BlueArc will keep piling on programmable chips, to
achieve higher levels of parallel processing.
Maybe storage savant Richie Larry summed up The End of Storage best.
"George," he said, only half in jest, "you say Nortel can now do 80-gig
streams, and you can put a thousand lambda streams on a fiber, and you can
put a thousand fibers in a cable. And it takes photons 30 milliseconds to
cross the continent. That means there are hundreds of terabytes in that
cable at any single point in time. If you just keep it moving, why do we
need any storage at all?"
B |
