Looking through the industry’s crystal ball

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.