Top 10 storage predictions for 2008

BANGALORE, INDIA: Companies grappling with issues of cost, management and resource allocation within their storage infrastructure can take heed. New technologies are available to help address their issues.

According to Hu Yoshida, CTO of Hitachi Data Systems, 2008 will see the rise of technologies like data de-duplication, thin provisioning and services-oriented storage. The rise of these technologies is timely as most IT organizations within companies are facing rapid data growth, shrinking IT budgets and higher expectations.

The following are the top 10 key technology predictions that will impact businesses in 2008:

1. Controlling Carbon Emissions:

A major source of carbon emissions comes from the generation of electricity. The increasing demand for compute power, network bandwidth, and storage capacity will increase the need for data centre power and cooling.

2. Economic Uncertainty: 

Doing more with less will drive It to consider ways to consolidate IT resources through virtualization, increase utilisation of resources, such as server cycles and storage capacities, eliminate redundancies where ever possible through de-duplication and single instance store, and reduce the working set of production data through the aggressive use of archive products.

3. Increasing Use of Archiving: 

An avalanche of unstructured data will be driven by RFID tags, smart cards, and sensors that monitor everything -- from heartbeats to border crossings. This will call for new types of archiving systems that can scale to petabytes and provide the ability to search for content across different modalities of data. 

4. Awareness of Storage Deficiencies: 

A new architecture that can scale performance, connectivity, and capacity, non-disruptively to multiple petabytes is required. It must also be able to provide new data and storage services like multi-protocol ingestion and common search, across heterogeneous storage arrays with centralised management and secure protection.

5. Data Mobility will be a Key Requirement:

The movement of data will have to be offloaded to a storage system which can move data over high speed Fibre Channel links without the need for the application’s processor cycles.

6. Control Unit Virtualization of Storage:

Control Unit Virtualization of Storage will be recognised as the only approach to storage virtualization that can add value to existing storage arrays. A control unit based approach to virtualization is able to leverage all the rich functionality of the control unit to enhance the functionality of lower cost or legacy tiers of storage arrays. 

7. Services Oriented Storage:

Services Oriented Storage will become a requisite complement to Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) in the application space and to Services Oriented Infrastructure (SOI) in the infrastructure space, to achieve the dynamic data centre of the future.

8. Convergence of Content, File, and Block based Storage Services:

High availability clusters of content servers and file servers will use a common block virtualization services platform, under one common set of management tools. This will enable content servers or file servers to leverage common block services like distance replication, thin provisioning, or virtualization of heterogeneous storage systems.

9. Thin Provisioning: 

Thin provisioning will provide the biggest benefit in increasing the utilisation of storage by eliminating the waste of allocated but unused storage capacity. This savings is multiplied many times over by eliminating the need to copy that allocated but unused capacity every time a copy is required for backup cycles, replication, data mining, development test, data distribution, etc.

10. Deduplication:

Deduplication is especially effective in eliminating duplicated data in backups. Other forms of deduplication like single instance store for archives, and copy on write for snapshots will become more prevalent.