Why are dense storage platforms like storage grids becoming popular?
One of the givens in our industry is that storage capacities are continuing to explode. Data rates are going to grow 50% to 60% per year over the next five years and in excess of 85% of that growth will be unstructured data… in other words, file system-based data. So now, companies have to realistically think about how they put platforms in place that can store petabytes of data over time. The older architectures, the more monolithic approaches, don’t provide a good way to do that cost-effectively. So we’re seeing the introduction of storage grids and scale-out approaches targeted at unstructured data — things like Web 2.0 and then also secondary applications like backup and archive. These dense storage platforms use a very different approach from the monolithic architectures of the past. You can pay as you grow with them and you can add performance, I/O or capacity to these things independently, which gives you a lot of flexibility in building the configuration that best meets your p
