SBB -- maybe you missed that particular standards announcment. It stands for "Storage Bridge Bay".
There hasn't been a lot written about it, but -- if you buy a lot of storage -- this is a standard worth watching. There's a bit about it here, here and here.
One of my favorite quips is "God must have loved standards committees, he created so many of them". So what's the deal with this one, and why should you care?
Context
Think about entry level storage today, just for a moment. Not the bigger arrays, but the smaller ones. A lot of money gets spent in that category, by organizations both large and small.
You basically have two choices.
Some people buy servers loaded with internal storage. It's easier and cheaper -- at least up front. But, if at some point you decide you want consolidate all of the disks you've bought into a shared SAN or NAS array, well, you pretty much have to start over with new disks *and* migrate all of your data from old to new. Yuch.
Other people bite the bullet, and spring for some sort of shared storage resource. Costs more up front, there's some additional complexity, but -- even if you've done that -- you're basically locked into the vendor you bought it from for upgrades etc.
Enter SBB
The idea behind SBB is to create the relevant standards that allows the interchange of core components. Buy a SBB-compatible internal disk from a server vendor ; you're free to move it into a SBB-compatible array at some future point. Save your disk, save your data.
Or, maybe you've got a 4Gb FC SAN array, and you've been eyeing something newer, like a 10Gb enet model. The premise of SBB is that you'd be able to buy the new controller for your storage array -- potentially from a different vendor that sold you the array.
All of the sudden, it's a whole new ball game.
Storage array vendors are free to sell to server customers who've bought internal disks as part of their server farm. Controller vendors are free to sell to storage array customers who might want something faster or better. And, of course, disk vendors are free to sell to everyone without going through the usual intermediaries.
Customer get better investment protection. Customers get more choice and competition for what they're doing with storage. And every vendor has to sharpen their game considerably.
Well, that's the idea, anyway. I like it.
So, what does this mean?
I don't think you'll see the first SBB-compliant products until late 2007 or early 2008. There will be all sorts of noise and debate as these products come into the market. And, like any plug-and-play standard, the proof will be in the interoperability over long periods of time.
But, if you understand a bit about how storage market dynamics work, this is an incredibly disruptive development in several regards.
- Server vendors will have to adjust their design points, most likely to have more modest storage bay capacities, since the incentive to pile a large amount of disks inside a single server is somewhat diminished. I think they'll be "strongly encouraged" to support the standard, since a server that supports SBB will be more valuable than one that doesn't.
- Storage vendors will need to support (and price) their array products understanding that customers will want to populate these enclosures with existing disks, or maybe someone else's storage controller. That should be fun. But, like the server vendors, the entry-level array makers will be "strongly encouraged" to support the standard, since an array that supports SBB will be more valuable than one that doesn't.
- Customers will have to readjust how they think about storage purchases, including asking server vendors to unbundle server and disk components, which is not the practice today. They'll also have to decide whether this feature is something they want, and start telling their suppliers that they're very interested.
The Big Picture
Is this commoditization of storage in action? You betcha.
But there's still room for boatloads of innovation from both server and storage vendors -- but the action will move upstream to things like software functionality, customer support and so on.
Should be fun!
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