Looking through the industry’s crystal ball

The next five years should prove to be very interesting for the evolution of storage. Existing technology such as storage virtualisation, Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and SATA will continue to develop, while cutting-edge technologies only starting to gain traction now, such as serial attached SCSI (SAS), encryption and thin provisioning, will move into the mainstream. Demand for storage capacity will continue to increase exponentially driven by factor evident over the past five years, dollars per gigabyte will continue to fall, and green datacentres are set to become an increasingly high priority.

IDC’s program director - Asia Pacific storage research, Simon Piff, said demand for new disk storage capacity in Australia is expected to increase between 2007 and 2012 at a CAGR of 57.1%. He also believes that midrange, modular storage systems will “come to dominate the market, displacing expensive, monolithic storage systems.”

While SAS disk technology has yet to achieve mainstream acceptance, certainly not nearly as rapidly as SATA has, Piff believes that users’ demand for higher capacity will see SAS rapidly gain market acceptance in the near future. “Some of these will be deployed in mixed drive configurations within one storage system, while others will be deployed in dedicated systems with a specific focus.

“Multi-tiered storage networks will emerge with the increase in data to be stored and managed. IDC also expects many new-generation entry level systems to be built around high-capacity SATA or SAS drives while iSCSI is expected to steadily gain considerable market support this year and beyond. While many users have started to build SANs based on iSCSI, Fibre Channel will continue to dominate datacentres for the next four to five years. Storage consolidation based on a networked storage infrastructure to increase utilisation rates and reduce management costs will also gain ground,” explained Piff.
Having a strong software offering to provide device management and provisioning as well as data management will be critical for vendors’ and resellers’ success over the next five years as storage takes up an increasing share of IT hardware budgets. This will be driven by U.S. compliance requirements which will continue to have a knock-on effect on Australian companies as local governments tighten up regulations in the same area. As a result, storage for records retention purposes is likely to become more accepted by organisations over the next five years.

Piff also believes that Solid State Disk (SSD) drives will become more mainstream over the next five years, but at least for the near future will only appeal to organisations that need fast access to data. “SSDs are not new, having been apparent in many flash-based devices (phone’s, USB drive’s, MP3 players, etc.) for a while now, but there is a slow emergence of this technology in enterprise storage devices. There are still some end-user concerns about the technology, and price is still much higher than the traditional electro-magnetic devices in use today, so for now IDC only sees this as a niche play, where speed of access to data far outweighs any other economic factors, or where its Input/Output operations Per Second (IOPS) speed is required.”

Spectrum Data CEO, Craig Tamlin, agreed with Piff that “one of the biggest growth areas has been the increasing trend or requirement for companies to ensure that data is being retained – primarily due to regulatory compliance and legislation pressure. eDiscovery requirements and preparedness is becoming a big issue for many organisations and the need to maintain or regain access to critical backup and archived data is paramount. The legal, financial and corporate reputation consequences can be huge – and have been proven in several big legal proceedings.

“The challenge is in ensuring continued access to archive and backup data when the industry norm is to upgrade and move storage software and hardware every couple of years. Do you still retain staff who have the skills to use old storage technology in-house? Do you still maintain and keep running the redundant storage technology in-house in parallel to the new technology to meet these compliance requirements? Can you afford the mass migration of all archived data to new storage formats every time you upgrade? These are all real issues which can have real legal and economic consequences if not handled correctly.”

Dimension Data general manager data centre solutions, Ronnie Altit, believes that “connectivity vendors are also going to want to move more into the network and there is going to a battle over where data is encrypted – at the network, disk or storage processor layer. Overall, there’s going to be a move towards information management rather than just storing and recovering data. In particular there’s going to be an emphasis on how organisations manage unstructured data, and we will see the growth of technologies such as Sharepoint, etc., as document management becomes more pervasive.”

Network Appliance’s marketing director Australia &New Zealand, Roger Mannett, believes that increased virtualisation at the storage level will characterise the next five years. “Virtualisation beyond a single disk sub system or array, as a ‘global’ (within the data centre) will be an emerging challenge to conventional thinking.

“Data from an application may span multiple arrays, enabling better performance management, and handling of peak loads, without a technology change. And significantly improved management tools will be required to manage the large amounts of data that will be stored. Taking the next step, virtualisation of the desktop will be the ‘Next Big Thing’ with savings on power, data management and data security being significant benefits in this area.”

Mannett also believes that the consolidation that has characterised the market over the past few years will continue. “Smaller players in the industry will either be acquired or find it harder to compete with the larger companies with big research and development budgets,” he predicted.

IBRS’s Dr Kevin McIsaac believes that though virtualisation has hyped, it will start to deliver on its promise as ‘thin provisioning’ becomes increasingly popular over the next five years. In his ‘Management briefing paper, Storage Virtualisation: Get Real, August 2007’, he said: “The next major step forward in storage virtualisation is ‘thin provisioning.’ This is a provisioning mechanism for allocating storage capacity on a ‘just in time’ basis from a single shared capacity pool. In this approach the physical storage is only allocated when it is used, not when it is provisioned. This avoids the poor utilisation rates that can occur with traditional provisioning, where large volumes of storage capacity are allocated to an individual application but often remain unused.”

EMC product marketing manager, Clive Gold, believes that over the next five years the storage industry will alter dramatically. “The fundamental storage architecture will change as ‘Fibre Channel’ mechanical disk drives get replaced by cheaper, faster and more reliable solid state flash drives. The speed of these systems enables more intelligence to be built into the storage system, encryption, de-duplication, etc.”

Acronis general manager, Bill Taylor-Mountford, added that “the volume of content driven by the Web – particularly applications that come under the heading of Web 2.0 – is going to drive even greater demand for storage and backup. A 1TB drive starts to look too small when you realise it takes over 700 gigabytes to store one movie.”

While there is a lot of talk of doing more processes in the cloud, StorageCraft regional director Asia Pacific, Greg Wyman, believes that off site backup and disaster recovery over the internet is going to be a big trend.

Symantec A/NZ director systems engineering, Paul Lancaster, said that green storage is a trend gathering force. “With energy costs in a typical data centre doubling every five years, there is growing demand for software and systems that can make more efficient use of existing resources. Organisations can achieve energy reduction without having to completely replace the hardware.”

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) chief technologist, Simon Elisha, believes data centre problems will worsen before Green goes mainstream. “Many Australian companies have hit a wall in the data centre, running out of floor space or reaching the limits of their electrical and cooling systems. This will force CIOs and IT managers to turn toward leaner, greener practices, such as Dynamic Provisioning, Data De-duplication, Power-Down and Storage Virtualisation.”

Elisha believes that over the next five years data de-duplication will hit prime time. De-duplication is the biggest storage industry innovation since storage virtualisation, and will reach prime time in 2008 as IT managers discover the technology. Data de-duplication can deliver savings of 10:1, 20:1 and even over 25:1 in terms of storage backups.”

By contrast, Sun Microsystems storage product manager A/NZ, Steve Stavridis, and storage practice manager A/NZ, Anthony Clarke, said data de-duplication hype is high at the moment. Data de-duplication compares each block of data with the existing stored block of data. It is a new technology, acquisitions of smaller players are rife and it is only really being implemented by early adopters of technology. Many are waiting to see the outcomes of these organisations.”