Article on CAS

Numark · Joined: Nov 19, 2005 Posts: 6

Hello everybody,

Found this article on CAS titled: Tech Report: Content-addressed storage preferred for fixed-content storage
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid5_gci1194867,00.html

The author paints a rather bright picture: "In the future, it's likely CAS products will emerge as the preferred means of managing structured and unstructured retention data."

What do you think?

wegrzyn · Joined: Apr 26, 2006 Posts: 1

I think he is right on the money, in more ways than one.

First, I think the boxes are too fixed function. Secondly, I believe the pricing is almost predatory - come on $350,000 for 50 TB. Third, I think the there is too little experience in knowning how to manage petabytes worth of data.

ericgreen · Joined: Jan 10, 2006 Posts: 1

I agree with the article, but what I learned from the recent CAS Community Survey is that still not enough people understand what CAS is or how to implement it which in my opinion continues to be the barrier to adoption.

I think the survey, and other data relating to issues near and dear to IT manager and execs hearts like Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of using CAS compared to what many are doing, which is using already installed storage technologies like SAN or NAS or whatever.

The more we talk about the issues....ie. various compliance regulations are continuing to lead to a rapid increase in the amount of fixed data retention needed among enterprises and agencies - and tie that to TCO (ie - costs are skyrocketing because your IT department is using expensive storage devices space to keep up with these increases) - the quicker we will see true adoption.

I think the more practitioners, vendors and channel partners who are out there using and selling this technology understand all of this, the more it will benefit the larger IT and enterprise community.

Bob_C · Joined: Mar 26, 2006 Posts: 7

I totally agree. We need to talk about CAS more and try to establish exactly what it is and what the value is in the minds of business decisionmakers.

I found this article which in mind hit the CAS problem right on.

http://www.esj.com/storage/article.aspx?EditorialsID=2125&pg=1

The main idea is:
"Like other industry jargon, such as continuous data protection (CDP) or information lifecycle management (ILM) or wide area file services (WAFS), to cite just a few examples, an otherwise simple–to-understand idea has become cluttered with many interpretations."

Isn't that the truth? I don't think that the vendors themselves are sure what CAS is. How can you expect businesses to figure it out...