Cisco: The Past, Present and the Future of Storage Traffic Visibility and Analytics

There have been countless amounts of industry research and many volumes written about data visibility and analytics with the advent of the Big Data Era. However, these discussions rarely delve into visibility and analytics requirements for storage and storage networking technologies. This is somewhat ironic because Big Data term itself was invented as an expression of the challenges and opportunities associated with exponential growth in data storage.

In this blog, we’ll attempt to make good on this oversight with a look back and forward at the importance of visibility and analytics for optimizing storage networking. This importance cannot be understated as storage networking technologies have evolved dramatically in terms of scale and performance and as new technologies have emerged such as NVMe over fabrics. Today we operate in realms of millions of input/out per second (IOPS) and in response times measured in microseconds,  faster than a blink of an eye. As such, the need for deep visibility and advanced analytics has never been greater to overcome the risks of the “unknown”.

Paresh Gupta, in this video, walks us through the Past, Present and the Future of Storage Traffic Visibility and Analytics.

First, a look back at what was possible before. The very first offering in terms of storage traffic visibility was based on a reactive approach using inline traffic analyzers. This dates back to the same time as the launch of 1-Gbps Fibre Channel and these devices were designed to capture optical signal on one port and then regenerate the same signal on another port. Users could see all the Fibre Channel primitives at the physical layer of the network as well as the control and end-to-end data frames flowing between the initiator and the target.

Read the entire article here, The Past, Present and the Future of Storage Traffic Visibility and Analytics

Via the fine folks at Cisco Systems.