Yes, there is unstructured data and if you have an awful lot of it, the HP StorageWorks 9100 Extreme Data Storage System looks like a really great place to put it. I’m biased though because the software that drives the StorageWorks 9100 is PolyServe-my former company. I’m glad to see HP doing good things with PolyServe since the acquisition in 2007. Too many large corporate mergers end up in a mess. I’m glad to see that isn’t happening to my old friends and former PolyServe colleagues!
This offering is geared more towards density and cost than performance from what I can see. Nonetheless, having over 3 GB/s NFS bandwidth will come in handy given the capacities this offering supports.
Cool technology!
Kevin Closson's Blog: Platforms, Databases and Storage 
Yes, some forecasts have unstructured data growing at 90% compounded annual growth rate year-over-year, surpassing structured data in both size and revenue in 2011.
Most of this data won’t be “hot”, and new architectures based on clustered file systems and scalable building blocks are going to emerge as alternatives to traditional filers for holding this ever-expanding content.
I think that the growth of unstructured data is going to lead to more serious looks at storage tiering in many organizations – with hot tiers for databases and “hot” files focused on performance and protection, but being capped in terms of size, and much larger tiers as cost and capacity-optimized content depots for the ever growing unstructured data (mostly files).
While IOPS and protection features – mirroring, RAID, synchronous replication, snapshots – define the hot tier, different things will emerge to define the nearline tier. Compression, dedupe for primary storage, cost per TB, TB’s per rack, TB’s per watt, etc will be the must-have list the way that SPECsfs numbers were the key requirement for a Tier 1 filer in the past.
This ExDS offering is a good entry on all of those metrics.
Ah, Carter. Great to see you stop by! I’ve been checking out your blog too. But, what? No link to mine? Shucks.
I hope all is well in your part of the world.