The storage controller of the future

As an analyst at ESG I've seen a bunch of storage controller designs from startups over the past couple years. Most have traits in common that are very unlike the enterprise-class storage controllers that dominate the high end of the market today. Emerging storage controllers are being built using commodity components. Intel servers clustered together into a singly managed scalable system is the rule. Most are using commodity SATA drives -- the same drives being used in entry level servers. Most are built using Linux instead of a homegrown or embedded operating system.

So what does the enterprise-class storage controller of the future look like? I believe it will look more like an emerging clustered based storage controller than the currently shipping enterprise-class solutions from EMC, HDS and IBM. Today clustered storage controllers communicate with each other using Gigabit Ethernet or Fiber Channel. In the future I believe we'll see 10GigE, or Infiniband, or ASI for PCI Express. Today the drives are 3.5" . In the future we'll see 2.5" and even 1" drives. Today clustered storage controllers use off-the shelf adapters to connect to servers and hard drives. In the future we'll see adapters with programmable offload, compression, encryption and replication built-in. Gone will be the proprietary bus architectures of legacy enterprise-class storage controllers. Gone will be the custom hardware connected to that proprietary bus. Gone will be the cost of all that custom hardware. Over time I believe that enterprise-class storage controllers built using standardized commodity components will be the exception rather than the rule as it is today.

Besides storage geeks like me who've engineered storage controllers, why else would anyone care? End users care because they save money. Just as servers that have reached commodity price levels due to standardization and commoditization, hardware prices will drop. Vendors should care because first to market wins.