Looking through the industry’s crystal ball

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.”

ball crystal data centre industrys looking servers & storage the through