The gradual evolution of storage continues

Demand for storage capacity has been strong over the past five years. This has been driven by data intensive applications such as email, customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and business intelligence (BI), as well as business continuity and disaster recovery requirements.

The other major factor driving storage capacity increases is the gradual introduction of electronic records retention policies. “Many organizations in the United States have already introduced enhanced retention policies for customer data, employee records, and corporate data such as memos, presentations, and spreadsheets,” said Piff. “IDC observes that this requirement has been introduced to many countries in the Asia Pacific region.

“Capturing, organizing, and storing such data as email, instant messages and blogs can be expensive, but this is necessary when legal issues arise. These newer forms of electronic data are growing at rates of more than 50 percent annually and are located across a wide spectrum of devices. Most large companies will need to design electronic records retention programs, implement far more extensive archival procedures, and provide far more storage capabilities than before.”

There has also been an increasing proportion of disk storage systems being networked over the past five years. In 2003 there was still a lot of direct attached storage (DAS) around, and while it will most likely never go away completely “IDC has observed an increasing awareness of the benefits associated with the networked storage architecture, leading to a gradual increase in SAN and NAS storage deployments,” said Piff. “The line between SAN and NAS is also becoming less distinct as more vendors overcome architectural barriers.”

The last big trend over the past five years has been the gradual maturation of iSCSI from overhyped technology that no one was actually using to a technology starting to attract serious user attention and interest. “IDC has observed that smaller organizations are starting to deploy iSCSI solutions. Due to the ubiquity of IP networks in user organizations, iSCSI potentially offers a cost-effective way to implement storage networks so iSCSI is poised for high growth.

“Most storage vendors are already supporting iSCSI. Although iSCSI has initially been positioned as a low-cost, easy solution rather than a replacement for Fibre Channel SANs in datacenters, it also has the potential to become a technology that can drive prices down further and offer a cost-effective storage solution for many organizations.”

Network Appliance’s Marketing Director - Australia & New Zealand, Roger Mannett, believes there have been three main changes in the last five years – disk density, network speeds and management. “Disk density, or recording density to be correct, has skyrocketed. In 2003 we were probably working the last of the 73 gigabyte - 3.5-inch drives, mainly Fibre Channel attached with perhaps some SCSI approaching end of life. Today we are using Fibre Channel drives at densities up to 300 gigabyte, SATA drives are becoming mainstream and densities of up to 1 terabyte are now a reality.”

Network speeds have also jumped over the past five years. In 2003, Fibre Channel was 1 GB/sec and IP/Ethernet was 100 MB at the desktop to 1 GB at the core. Today, Fibre Channel has increased to 4 GB, Gigabit Ethernet at the desktop and 10GB at the core is a reality with 100 GB coming down the pipeline.

Management of enterprise disk systems has also developed considerably in the past five years. “In 2005, management was by a command line interface where the syntax was complex and exacting,” said Mannett. “Operational staff required extensive training, and the deployment of storage was slow. Today’s management tools allow for a much simpler GUI interface - often down to a web browser, making the operations and provisioning of storage a much simpler task, less prone to errors, and far speedier to deliver.”

StorageCraft regional director Asia Pacific, Greg Wyman, believes the two big trends of the last five years have been virtual tape libraries (VTL’s) and disk-to-disk backup. “When VTLs first came out, there was lots of market excitement. However, it quickly became apparent they didn’t eliminate backup windows - they simply moved the pain point to another area on the network.” VTLs did pave the way for disk-to-disk-to-tape and real time recovery argued Wyman, a technology that has become increasingly popular over the last five years. “Companies of all sizes are migrating to disk-based backup technology and real-time recovery.”