Migration, deletion, Stockpiling in 2010 bytes

MUMBAI, INDIA: As organizations migrate to new Microsoft platforms over the next year, they will need various storage management and data management technologies in place. While upgrading is not always a priority for IT organizations, given tight budgets and the resources needed to manage the process, newer versions can offer significant technological advancements and performance enhancements that can help organizations better meet their SLAs. 

This could be termed as a year of migration as per a Symantec'strend watch on storage. As organizations migrate, they will likely make technology improvements across the board to provide improved protection and management that will support all Microsoft applications in the most efficient way.   However, it is important that organizations not treat these new applications in a silo manner and apply platform level backup, deduplication, archiving, retention, and E-Discovery solutions.  A trusted platform can address both new and old applications in a centralized way. 

The company also points 2010 as 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. 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 backup as the long term storage location.  Backup will return to its intended use and recovery while archiving will step in to manage the long term retention and disposition of information.

It adds that 2010 ends the stockpiling of backup tapes for long term retention. Backup 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 backup changes to focus on short-term recovery – fast de-duplicated backups and rapid, granular recovery with built-in replication to DR sites.

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.  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.

In 2010, more users will be able to benefit from virtualization as competition increases among providers.  Not only will Hyper-V provide added functionality with Windows Server 2008 R2, IBM will likely have continued support with AIX.  In 2010, it will be clear that users can leverage all flavors of virtualization, not just x86.  As virtualization becomes even more widespread and prolific, users will need to implement strategies and technologies that help them to manage the entire IT infrastructure – whether physical or virtual – in a robust, yet simplified and user-friendly way.

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