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.