The gradual evolution of storage continues

Sun Microsystems storage product manager A/NZ, Steve Stavridis, and storage practice manager A/NZ, Anthony Clarke, cite storage virtualisation, Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), the development of SATA drives and the growing ubiquity of SAN and NAS technology as being the big trends over the past five years.

Storage virtualisation, the process of abstracting logical storage from a pool of physical storage, is a technique that aims to improve low levels of storage resource utilisation and reduce the high costs of storage management by using less hardware. Savings are realised through reduction in floor space usage, decreased power and cooling requirements, maintenance costs and management costs.

“What we have seen over the past five years is that some storage virtualisation solutions add complexity instead of reducing it,” according to Stavridis and Clarke. “So although storage virtualisation has been a major trend over the past five years, it is not a must at any cost.”

“ILM, a business centred way of managing the data-centre based on the value of information (which changes over time) and the underlying cost of storage, was the ‘next big thing’ five years ago. It was meant to be an approach to managing information growth, yet most vendors used a different definition and pointed to a tiered infrastructure which has made the term ILM nearly meaningless.”

SATA (serial ATA) disks have proved to be an expansive disk drive technology which allowed more data to be put online at a lower cost to Fibre Channel. This helped to drive further the adoption of SAN and NAS technology which has been another major trend over the past five years. “Someone said in 2002 that ‘Storage area networks (SANs) are the future of enterprise storage, period. If your company is heading toward, or has already passed, the terabyte mark in storage, it’s a prime candidate for a SAN migration,’ argued Stavridis and Clarke. “This certainly has been the case. SANs and NASs have become the industry standard architectures for consolidating storage.”

Indeed SAN and NAS technology has been commoditised to such an extent that the ‘boxes’ have become unimportant and the focus is on services and the surrounding software. SAN and NAS technology is also extending into the SME and even the SMB, according to Hitachi Data Systems’ chief technologist, Simon Elisha.

“There is a much bigger focus on the breadth of capability from a solution perspective. Five years ago, the latest sized hard drive and newest ‘box’ got the most attention. Today, it is about what storage services can be provided to the business in the fastest time with the greatest efficiency. All storage providers can service customers’ capacity needs, there is much more of a focus around operational efficiency and effectiveness of the solutions. This extends into the relevant software stacks and services components of any solution.

“The SME/SMB space is now demanding capabilities typically associated with enterprise customers at an SME price-point. The capacities required by these customers are growing dramatically. Today, it is not uncommon for an SME customer to have over 100TB of storage and an SMB customer have 5TB+. This introduces new demands around reliability, performance, flexibility and manageability that did not exist five years ago.”

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