Setting the ground for ILM

What could possibly be the link between Arkivio, HP and Western Digital? To defuse any possible conspiracy theory, I'll say that there is no secret liaison (that I know of) between them, but a rather popular acronym, ILM, can be the link that puts these three vendors briefly on the same page and about at the same time.

The acronym is ILM, which stands for information lifecycle management, the often abused rationale for many "my storage is better than yours" claims.

I'll start in alphabetical order with Arkivio, also because the company has been cooking Autostor, its own rendering of ILM, for a few years, longer before EMC began thumping its chest while using those three letters as a battle-cry.

Connecting Arkivio to ILM is not much of a stretch, but to put this in some time frame I'll add that the company recently briefed me on their latest addition to Autostor: Integration with the Netapp API which follows similar feats with EMC's Celerra and Centera.

Autostor has many noteworthy features including great scalability, and the ability to quickly classify storage devices and files, which simplifies creating rules for automated data movements.

Obviously the main reason to deploy ILM systems like Autostor is to store data in the most cost-efficient fashion, for example moving senescent files from costly and fast storage, say from 15K RPM FC drives to a less expensive accommodation.

How do we define that "less expensive accommodation"? For HP that spells FATA, a rather predictable acronym for a technology that involves implanting FC connectors and controls (the -F- in FATA) over the body of an ATA disk drive.

Why is HP (together with other vendors) legitimating this hybrid drive? To keep manufacturing cost under control, of course. In fact, those FATA drives are plug-compatible with real FC drives, which means that an array vendor doesn't have to change a thing to offer customers arrays with both drives varieties installed. Recently HP restated its preference for FATA.

Needless to say, FC agnostic Western Digital sees things quite differently, and is proposing SATA drives instead to populate the cheap end of ILM storage. In fact, about one year ago WD launched a new category of SATA drive, the RE (RAID Edition) type, offering more resilience at a slightly higher cost.

Again to close in on that time frame, WD just told me of a new 400 GB drive based on SATA RE2, a new version of the technology that promises even more reliability.

So which approach is better for ILM? ATA drives in FC clothes as in FATA or beefed up SATA drives? First of all (and to prevent lynching)ILM is not the only application these two families of drives can support.

Moreover, I don't think there is an easy answer to that question. For vendors of FC based enclosures, FATA makes much sense, at least as long as they will use FC drives.

However, the SATA RE approach has a built-in advantage because SATA drives can share the same controller with SAS drives. As SAS based arrays become more popular, using SATA RE drive will probably also have a boost. I'll put my money on SATA RE, but not right now.