Enterprise tagging, WinFS, and Storage 2.0

What is Storage 2.0?

I promise that I’ll get off of the del.icio.us kick that I’ve been on lately. But the functionality employed by del.icio.us partially lends itself in analogical ways into what’s being called Storage 2.0. What is Storage 2.0? It’s the less geeky way to refer to Storage Existentialism. I also recently described it in my post regarding “The Star Alliance” of Storage.

With del.icio.us, users tag web pages and other objects for themselves and others. They’re creating user managed pointers to data that can be shared and reused.

The concept of user generated tagging already exists in the business world and it’s been around for a long time. Storage 2.0 is the new layer of data storage management that can leverage user and application tags. It refers to the way that business data will be tagged and managed by real-time value rather than by physical storage aspects. It’s not limited to unstructured content like Word, Excel, and PDF files. It spans all business assets such as radiology images in a hospital, video feeds in a Digital Asset Management application, and structured objects found in a relational database.

So the new layer that represents Storage 2.0 consists of reusable, programmatically generated tags that describes data for the purpose of more efficient storage management.

“How will WinFS work in the Storage 2.0 world, Raj?”

So you’ve been reading up on the next generation Windows relational object file system and you want to know how it will play out in the new layer of storage management. The real impact of WinFS will depend on adoption by application developers. Without being “aware” of WinFS, it will have no benefit to users other than the fact that Windows Explorer will have extensions that allow you to view a “document that represents other documents.”

But in the world of storage management for businesses, user workstation file systems have no implication on the data center. So how will WinFS work in the data center where Storage 2.0 really fits? To take advantage of this new functionality, server applications and processes will still need to be aware of the ability to create and read data in this new relational object file system. There are many server type applications that can benefit from such a file system, but developers have been overcoming this for years with other methods that are actually quite elegant and graceful.

When (and if) server application developers take advantage of the functionality in the new file system, it will essentially become a transparent part of the Storage 2.0 layer. This is assuming that enterprises choose to store data on a Windows managed file system. Enterprises aren’t ditching their high-powered, industrial strength Unix and Linux based storage servers just yet.

Microsoft will need to prove the scalability of the file system with some huge benchmarks before enterprises trust it for mission critical storage. Though the theoretical limit is very high, NTFS has been known to have real-world upper limits in terms of file count per partition due to performance issues.