When designing a data centre, conventional wisdom holds that servers should do the thinking while storage systems should hang onto the data. But some industry heavyweights have begun seeing things a little differently.
IBM's machines based on its Power5+ processor now have features that enable a storage-server hybrid design. And this month, Sun Microsystems began selling a hybrid of its own, "Thumper", a 7-inch-tall, 24-terabyte system officially called the Sun Fire X4500. And HP is tackling the idea with new blade servers.
While neither company expects hybrid systems to dominate, they argue there are some situations where it's good to have mixed abilities. IBM likes the idea of processing to intelligently manage storage tasks such as indexing, while Sun sees the combination as good for those who need a powerful, reliable way to pump data such as video streams onto a network.
"The lines are blurring," said Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff.
Historically, storage was often built into a server or directly attached to it. But within a big-computing infrastructure, storage increasingly has been relocated into a separate domain to improve efficiency and to ease management and maintenance.
For that reason, some see storage-server hybrids as a throwback.
"To be honest, we're seeing the market move in the opposite direction (than in the past)," said Patrick Rogers, vice president of products and partners at networked storage powerhouse Network Appliance. "People are disaggregating storage. They want to pool it for utilisation and efficiency reasons."
Indeed, revenue from networked storage systems is growing faster than from storage overall, according to an IDC study. Where the market for networked storage devices increased 15.4 percent to $2.8bn (£1.5bn) from the first quarter of 2005 to the first quarter of 2006, overall storage sales grew more slowly, at 6.7 percent, to $5.8bn.
But Sun is bullish about the idea, and...
