ahaslam

Haven't seen that particular one - thanks. Nasuni is actually a NAS filer but yes, the underlying benefit is the same. I haven't seen a SAN version yet though.

I believe this class of cloud-backed SAN/NAS products fall under the umbrella of 'hybrid' storage appliances, acting as gateways to easily distribute your data from a private cloud to the public cloud - as well as accelerators by virtue of their caching capabilities.

I also like the technology potential - the question I am asking myself is what use to put it to where there is real demand.

Yes - it is a cloud SAN. And it could easily be bundled with a software iSCSI stack in a virtual machine image as a virtual cloud storage gateway appliance for private datacenters. But for enterprise, I don't see the use case as primary storage ie. as the underlying storage for a DB. More likely as 'near-line' or archival storage where it is retained in a form that is readily mounted and accessible using standard FS api's for indexing, data mining etc. As I've been focused on consumer, I haven't done enough research into the comparable cost against other archival mechanisms like tape.

When I built it, I guess I was inspired by addressing my own pain points: I didn't have a flexible, easily interfaced data protection system that automatically made sure I had a copy of my files offsite. Like having the equivalent of a massive offsite external USB drive. I also wanted a solution that kept my files 'live' - rather than locked up in some arcane backup application image.

* Thanks for the feedback on the terms around security - will take this into account.

* Encryption is AES 256 on-the-fly - so it's encrypted before it hits local storage or remote storage - and it uses SSL for the transfer.

* The 256 Tb capacity is really just a way of moving the upper limit on capacity so that users don't have to worry about exhausting the available space in the volume - something that file-based solutions don't need to worry about. Users can choose whatever size volumes they want.

I also agree that spending on RAM will get you more bang for the buck - speeding up the inherently slow paging process before trying to prevent it in the first place doesn't really make sense, especially considering that a RAM upgrade will likely be cheaper.

I recently spec'd and built a new machine including a 110Gb PCIe SSD. As expected, it's pretty impressive for the low latency but it is also expensive and there's a couple of points worth mentioning about the general experience:

What I have noticed is that at these limited sizes, it's not long before your SSD volumes are maxed out and you end up having to choose and manage the datasets that reside on it - so a new PITA to deal with.

What also surprised me is that the technology was still a bit flaky - I had to tweak not only my BIOS but Windows 7 to use it reliably.

Even when that was sorted out, the flaky impression was reinforced when I tried some conservative RAM overclocking on the i7 Extreme - to find that I was starting to get FS corruption issues. So I now have a bank of fast RAM running at some fraction of their potential in deference to retaining FS integrity.

I'm not sure whether these issues are a result of the engineering required to address the SSD over PCIe - maybe SSD's accessed over SATA don't suffer the same issues.

So SSD is promising but not there yet.