BANGALORE, INDIA: Unprecedented explosion in data as well as enterprises' need for business continuity, disaster recovery solutions, and regulatory compliance has led to a corresponding surge in demand for better, faster and more efficient methods to store, process and provide data to the market.

Also Read: Top storage trends for 2010: Symantec

Despite tighter IT budgets, businesses are focused on gaining an edge by reducing operational risks.

As a result storage manufacturers are rapidly developing technologically advanced solutions to meet the information hungry market’s need for better data management and recovery.

According to Gartner and IDC, despite external disc storage revenue declined by about 10 percent to $4.4 billion in 2008, there are signs that the data storage market is turning around with more businesses purchasing storage technologies over the next twelve months.

The rising criticality of data and business’ dependency on digital information has led to larger and more complex information storage environments that are increasingly challenging to manage. IT storage professionals across the globe are facing challenges such as managing storage growth, meeting capacity needs, managing storage assets and complex infrastructure and a lack of skilled professionals.

Storage media and storage applications are the building blocks of the storage eco system; the current growing data storage technologies in both media and applications bring totality to the eco system.

Data storage and data life cycle management is a basic need in every organization. Industries like finance and banking, automotive and IT have humongous amounts of data storage requirements on a day-to-day basis, which has led to further studies on storage technologies and its life cycle management.

Emerging trends in storage media comprise of:  magnetic tapes, hard disk drives (HDD) and solid-state-disks (SSD).

Tapes are offline storage media used for data back-up and recovery following disasters. They are low cost and low performance [up to 40MB/sec in LTO Gen-2] media.  Tapes are a sequential storage media (Random access possible with near-line storage tape libraries) with low access speed.

Hard Disks are online storage media with random access. They display good performance [Up to 3.0 Gbits/sec in a SATA drive Gen-2] and are higher priced. The HDD mechanical parts cause low latency and lesser life.

Solid state disks display very good performance [550MB/sec for read and 300MB/sec for write] and are priced the highest. Absence of mechanical parts in SSDs results in high data throughput and longer life.

Emerging trends in storage applications comprise of:  Storage virtualization, continuous data protection (CDP), data de-duplication(De-Dupe) information life cycle management (ILM).

Storage Virtualization: Key features include support for virtual tape drives, virtual tape libraries and virtual volumes, features such as disaster recovery, important export of physical volumes, high availability and scalability. 

The benefits include-
1. Improved capacity utilization by 40 percent to 50 percent.

2. Automatic capacity expansion.

3. Resource sharing between heterogeneous servers.

CDP: Continuous data protection (CDP) is next generation data protection technology that solves key problems with conventional back-up approaches. By enabling the transparent capture of data changes in real time, it enables data protection solutions that no longer impose back-up window impacts on production applications and can support extremely granular recovery operations.

When CDP technology is integrated with key complementary technologies it forms the foundation for data protection offerings that do not impact production applications. 

The benefits include -
1. Continuous data capture as they occur in real time, completely moving away from the paradigm of back-up as a discrete operation.

2. Lowered bandwidth requirements, meets extremely stringent recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) requirements, and very reliable recovery operations.

De-dupe: Data de-duplication is a task of identifying record replicas in a data repository that refer to the same real world entity or object and systematically substitutes the reference pointers for the redundant blocks; also known as storage capacity optimization.

De-duplication is ideal for organizations wishing to back-up, consolidate and improve performance during back-ups.

The benefits include -

1. In cases where the data is being backed up or archived over and over again, the realized storage savings get better and better, achieving 20:1 (95 percent) in many instances.

2. Disk backup systems extend the benefits of data de-duplication across the enterprise, and integrate it with tape, replication, and encryption into a complete backup solution for multi-site environments. 

3. Data de-duplication reduces disk requirements by 90 percent or more and makes WAN-based replication a practical disaster recovery tool.

ILM: Hierarchical storage manager (HSM) is Policy-based data migration software which seamlessly migrates and de-migrates data across the storage hierarchy. Hard disk->Compact Disk-> Tape is one of the ILM applications.

With storage players having to battle customer perceptions about the complexity and high initial costs of data storage and management, the market is expected to turnaround in 2010, with pricing pressures easing and SMBs joining the bandwagon to equip themselves with storage solutions.

The author is Vice President and Head of Product Engineering Practice at Mindteck Semiconductor CoE.

The opinions expressed here in are the author's personal opinions and do not represent CIOL's view in anyway.