BANGALORE, INDIA: Symantec outlines the storage trends to watch in 2010.

1. The year 2010 is the ‘Year of Deletion’: Next year, enterprise IT administrators will continue to struggle with the continuing growth of information, while budgets continue to lag. 

The InfoPro says 2010 overall storage spending will improve over 2009, but many respondents are still expecting flat or even decreasing budgets.  The last time storage technology kept up with information growth was 2002.

Storage-as-a-Service: Cloud Storage

In order to keep up, storage admins will need to begin to lose their ‘pack rat’ mentality and start deleting information. The ‘delete’ mentality will lead to a shift from using back-up as the long term storage location. Back-up will return to its intended use and recovery while archiving will step in to manage the long term retention and disposition of information.

2. 2010 Ends the Stockpiling of Backup Tapes for Long Term Retention: Back-up is the wrong application for information retention because it is organized around information islands – systems – rather than information itself.

An active, de-duplicated archive with automated retention and deletion dramatically reduces the cost and time of long term information storage and retrieval. In 2010 the role of back-up changes to focus on short-term recovery – fast de-duplicated backups and rapid, granular recovery with built-in replication to DR sites.

3. De-duplication Everywhere: In 2010, de-duplication will become widely deployed as a feature, rather than a standalone technology. Seventy percent of enterprises still have not deployed de-duplication, but will leverage easier deployments next year as it becomes built into most storage offerings – everything from backup software, to primary storage, to replication and archiving software. 

Data Dedupe: More, but Less

As more enterprises reap the benefits of de-duplication and the gap it bridges with information management, the primary issue will become management of storage resources.  As a result, enterprises will look to vendors to deploy simplified and cross-platform de-duplication management that save time and money.

4. Industry Competition Drives Standardized Software: Both industry consolidation and increasing industry competition will drive the need for heterogeneous standardized management software in 2010. For example, the potential Sun/Oracle merger, as well as their competition with IBM and Cisco in the integrated x86 mainframe market, will provide a variety of choices for enterprises. 

These options will continue to create a need for data protection, storage, and high availability technologies that eliminate information islands formed by mainframe-like vertical integration.