Storage Trends To Watch In 2010: Symantec

Symantec has outlined the storage trends to watch for in 2010. The storage trends reveal that “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. 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.

Anand Naik, Director, Systems Engineering, Symantec India, said, “Both industry consolidation and increasing industry competition will drive the need for heterogeneous standardised 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”.

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The other significant storage trends for 2010 are as under:

-- Organisations Can No Longer Procrastinate ‘Going Green’: In 2009, organisations began to shift from implementing ‘green’ technologies primarily for cost reduction purposes, to a more balanced awareness of also improving the organisation’s environmental standing. In 2010, these two drivers will push most enterprise organisations to implement a ‘green’ strategy. IT decision makers are increasingly justifying green IT solutions by more than cost and IT efficiency benefits. They are now looking to a number of factors such as reducing electricity consumption, cooling costs and corporate pressure to be ‘green’.

-- 2010 Ends the Stockpiling of Back-up Tapes for Long-Term Retention: Back-up is the wrong application for information retention because it is organised around information islands – systems – rather than information itself. An active, de-duplicated archive with automated retention and deletion 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 back-ups and rapid, granular recovery with built-in replication to DR sites.

-- 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 back-up 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.

-- A Year of Migration: As organisations 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 organisations, given tight budgets and the resources needed to manage the process, newer versions can offer significant technological advancements and performance enhancements that can help organisations better meet their SLAs. As organisations 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 organisations not treat these new applications in a silo manner and apply platform level back-up, de-duplication, archiving, retention, and e-discovery solutions. A trusted platform can address both new and old applications in a centralised way.

-- Virtualisation Moves Beyond x86: In 2010, more users will be able to benefit from virtualisation 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 flavours of virtualisation, not just x86. As virtualisation 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.

-- Cloud Storage Catches On: As a growing number of enterprises look for ways to improve storage efficiency and reduce management complexity of their growing environments, they look to leverage storage architecture designs already deployed by storage service and public cloud providers. Most will begin to recognise the combination of commodity hardware infrastructure and value-added software as the best approach to deliver storage to the business, but will need to decide between public, private or hybrid models. In evaluating their options, enterprise storage managers must consider the cost, scalability, availability, manageability and performance of any solution that will serve as the foundation for file-based storage services.

-- Cloud Storage Drives Data Management: The continued move to cloud storage over the next year will drive enterprise organisations to implement more effective data management tools and strategies. While users can leverage cloud computing to ensure enhanced application performance and availability, there are also inherent risks that administrators will need to address to leverage this flexibility.