… but storage of the future, regardless of media will be object oriented.
Most people don’t realize it yet, but the future of data storage is object based. It has to be. It provides encapsulation, location independence, media independence, object attributes – such as authenticity. It maintains all the ‘old’ style attributes of date/time/name/logical location, but extends that with alternate logical locations, additional data, variable metadata (some systems) fixed metadata. You can move things around, and not have to tell the user nor application.
The latest storage vendor to join with an object oriented storage systems is Sun Microsystems. This week they announced the Sun/STK 5800, (or as known by it’s much cooler engineering moniker – Honeycomb). Others that play in this space include EMC Centera, Caringo CASStor, HDS HCAP, and NexSAN Assureon.
Sun has added a new component to the object oriented mix. Intelligence. Intelligence inside the storage that is. They’ve opened up the storage so that not only does it store your data, it is capable of doing things with it. Keep an eye out as this new component will get very interesting. Automated protections, encryptions, extractions, modifications, transformations, reformating etc can all come from the storage maximizing network bandwidth and server processing power. It’s one step closer to ’smart objects’, a concept that is the next step in data storage.
I don’t know what brand of storage there will be in the future, but I do know it will be object oriented!
..clark hodge
Great post, Clark
So — what would this mean to, say, a news organization that’s trying to figure out what to do with its content management system over the next 10 years? What kinds of decisions or purchases can those folks make today to position them well for this future, so they’re not losing their stuff (or scrambling to find it)?
- Amy