Preface

摘要

The rapid growth in demand for data storage continues, and we expect that the total capacity of storage systems will exhibit a sixfold increase between 2006 and 2010. This growth, coupled with changing customer requirements and shifts in technology, is changing the composition and design of storage systems. Topics for this special issue on storage technologies and systems are diverse and include such subjects as the emergence of nonvolatile storage technologies; virtualization technologies that reduce the distinction between storage and computing platforms; advances in tape densities; the growing use of commodity and distributed storage; and the increasing importance of error and disaster recovery, autonomic storage management, petascale file and archival storage, and long-term data preservation. The efficient management of data is an ongoing struggle between rapid access and the scalability required as a growing number of users access increasing amounts of data. The first paper, by Oehme et al., describes scale-out file services associated with network-attached storage (NAS) solutions. Their paper focuses on the challenges of creating a NAS solution with hundreds of nodes. The authors also consider the challenges of providing a high-performance facility for exporting data in parallel and the demands of storing very large amounts of data.