Time to Ask the Tough Grid Storage Questions

Are today's enterprise storage systems equipped to handle the rigors of Grid computing and service-oriented environments?

That was the question that we posed to this month's Globus Consortium Journal participants... and the rather conclusive feedback was that today's enterprise storage systems have a number of specific issues that must be addressed before they are to participate effectively in Grid and SOA environments.

We hear one analyst call storage systems expensive "junk drawers" that make it prohibitively complex for customers to ascertain the data contents. We hear several participants express concern with storage vendors' multiple management protocols and interfaces, which make it tough for even non-Grid customers to reconcile management between different types of storage systems. And we hear that today's enterprise Grids typically are relying on higher-level data mechanisms, rather than fully integrating with underlying storage systems.

So it would appear that the "Storage Grid" evolution is still in its infancy, and that this is an area that will require quite a bit of work for the Grid community to truly get over the hump in enterprise adoption.

But then you hear about very compelling projects and technologies that are reconciling the differences between research and enterprise storage environments. OGSA-DAI -- for example -- is creating a uniform access point to make it easier for Grid users to access relational databases. And as Dave Pearson from Oracle points out this month, there is a whole range of rapidly evolving technologies at the network level that are making it much easier to integrate storage systems together.

So there are reasons to be encouraged.

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