The storage industry is in for some change.

Biggest Developments:

• 10Gige
• RDMA & iWARP
  • RDMA
  • OpenFabrics.Org
• ZFS open sourced
  • Copy on Write (COW)
  • Thin Provisioning (Sparse Volumes)
• Improving open source iSCSI
  • LIO-Target
  • iSCSI Enterprise Target (IET)
  • OpenSolaris iSCSI Target

Cool Technologies to watch

• De duplication
  • On Client DeDupe
  • On Server, On the fly dedupe
  • On Server Post backup dedupe
  • duplicates within a system
  • duplicates between systems
  • incremental file differences in the same file on the same system
  • incremental file differences in a different file on the same system
  • incremental file differences in the same file on a different system
  • incremental file differences in a different file on a different system
• Thin provisioning
  • VM disk image files can achieve similar results for VMs
  • ZFS has sparse volumes!

RDMA related terms

• iWARP=the infiniband RDMA protocol ported to Ethernet
• iWARP=A suite of wire protocols comprised of RDMAP, DDP, and MPA. The iWARP protocol suite may be layered above TCP, SCTP, or other transport protocols.
• RDMAP=Remote Direct Memory Access Protocol, operates over DDP
• DDP=Direct Data Placement Protocol
• ULP=Upper Layer Protocol, a kernel bypass protocol, upper level applications (NFS, iSCSI, OS) can use ULP instead of traditional sockets.