Storage Toolkit

Metadata holds key to future of storage

David Berlind ZDNet.com

Published: 21 Oct 2003 14:55 BST

Even prior to the Documentum acquisition, EMC was already in the metadata-driven storage management business. In an interview earlier this year, EMC chief technology officer Mark Lewis described to me the main idea behind the company's Centera family of network attached storage."[Another] way we store information is as objects -- objects you can think of as unstructured data. Databases consist of structured data, which means relational records that are usually fairly dynamic and that have highly relational characteristics. Unstructured data is a photograph. That's unstructured data, where you're storing a big object with a little bit of information around the object. It's usually what we call fixed content. It's a medical image or an email record or a document that's been scanned in. It's not relational, but you still want it to be a record. We have Content Addressable Storage (CAS), which fits into that market place for storing those records." That little bit of information stored with the big object is -- you guessed it -- metadata.

Storage companies like EMC and content management companies like Documentum are a natural fit, says Steve Weissman, president of the industry analyst and management-consulting firm Kinetic Information. "Broadly speaking, content management focuses on organising and facilitating access to information once it is collected; storage systems generally protect that information and ensure its availability when needed. Since both usually make extensive use of metadata to speed the sharing and retrieval process along, they therefore can play quite well together. But to be maximally effective, they need to be constructed and utilised in concert, not as individual pieces of infrastructure."

While the EMC move for Documentum may spark a wave of consolidation in the storage virtualisation area, there's one likely-to-be-metadata-driven blip on the radar -- WinFS, a new Microsoft file system that's expected to be a part of the next version of Windows (code-named Longhorn). Microsoft has been leaking bits of news about Win FS, the latest of which cleared up some confusion as to whether Longhorn would include support for NTFS, the file system supported in the various derivatives of Windows NT including NT itself, 2000, and XP.