Anand Naik

BANGALORE, INDIA: The following are the top 7 storage trends for 2011:

1) The Last Mile of Virtualization

Virtualization has been one of the biggest shifts over the last year and will continue to influence IT in 2011.  

Companies everywhere are achieving the benefits of virtualization by reducing the number of servers in their environments. In addition, the ability to backup and recover applications and data from both physical and virtual environments with a single solution will help organizations reduce overall costs and IT complexity. However, it does lead to an increase in management costs, and without a plan to protect these environments; companies may not realize the full ROI. 

The rapid adoption, yet fragmented implementation and lack of standardization when it comes to virtual infrastructure will expose gaps in the security and backup of virtual environments over the next year. 

Also read: Storage trends 2010

2) Gap in Disaster Recovery for Virtual Environments

The number of applications and amount of data in virtual environments will grow significantly in 2011, increasing the need for disaster recovery solutions that protect these applications. 

The 2010 Symantec Disaster Recovery Survey found that while a little more than half of data within virtual systems is regularly backed up, there is significant room for improvement.

Remembering that virtual machine protection carries with it the same expectation that customers have of physical environments, organizations should implement disaster recovery technologies to ensure their mission-critical data in virtual environments is protected from everyday business risks to devastating disasters. 

3) Regain Control of Information Retention

The near infinite level of data retention is causing storage costs to skyrocket, extensive recovery times and e-Discovery nightmares across organizations of all sizes.

In 2011, organizations will re-evaluate their retention needs and automate their information management strategy to keep backups for 30 to 60 days, archive for long term storage and delete everything else.

4) Cloud Storage Grows Up 

More organizations will leverage public and private clouds as they become highly available. 

As we head into 2011, enterprises will require the ability to manage storage resources whether they're local, campus wide, multi-campus, global or in the cloud.  Tools will emerge to manage this new complex storage environment and to help IT administrators better understand and capture information about unstructured data that resides within it. 

The hybrid cloud archiving model will also be adopted to allow organizations to use hosted messaging services while keeping their archives on-premise to drive cost out of the discovery process, maintain strict access to data, and define who is searching it and where they are sending requests. 

5) The Right to Choose: Appliances, Software and Cloud

2011 will bring new delivery models in response to customer need to ease IT operations. Organizations can expect to tackle agility, technology and storage optimization through unified storage devices with security and backup cloud access.

Cloud computing, hosted services and appliances are examples of increasingly attractive delivery models that provide organizations with flexibility and ease of deployment.