• Home
• Articles Archive
• Features List

• Media Pack
• Contact Us
• Subscribe

JOURNEY into THE BEYOND

From STORAGE Magazine Vol 7, Issue 1 - February 2007

Which will be the hot buttons and drivers across the storage industry in the next 12 months? Will storage itself undergo a major transformation? And, if so, how so? Editor Brian Wall travels into the unknown with some of the industry's soothsayers to explore the year ahead

The year 2007 may well be a time when regulation and compliance become the key drivers across the storage industry. The need to comply with all the regulations surrounding the storage of data means that managing the increased demand for storage will be a key concern for businesses everywhere.

"One part of this will be the reduction of data duplication, using data management strategies like ILM to prevent archiving unnecessary data," states Bernard Zeutzius, European marketing manager for Cisco Data Center Architecture. And there is certainly a lot at stake; "Some companies are now losing [legal] trials because they haven't stored the correct historical email evidence and have lost a lot of money as a result."

He believes the big transformation in storage will be the continuing move towards disc. "For the past forty or fifty years, data centres have been mostly using tapes for archiving data, but now we are seeing more and more people using disc storage for all forms of data. Not only is disc reducing in price, it is a more effective way of storage data, as it is easier to access and easier to restore in the event of a disaster. Tape is increasingly being seen as an ineffective method of storing business-critical data, with high-profile cases of tapes being damaged or lost in transit. Businesses need a medium they can rely on, particularly with the increased focus on storage for compliance purposes."

Another big trend will be the growth of networked storage. "Networking storage greatly improves utilisation rates of storage resources, provides a simpler storage architecture with reduced operational load, and enables fast provisioning of resources and the simple delivery of an hierarchical storage environment, which is becoming of great interest with the advent of ILM processes. Previously, it was hard to get an overview of storage space, which led to businesses overspending on their storage resources."

Storage security will move away from just ensuring tapes are secure in transit towards encryption at rest, while storage consolidation will have a major part to play in 2007, Zeutzius believes, with services such as WAN optimisation and application acceleration technologies coming to the fore.

"Enterprises are increasingly attempting to centralise and consolidate their application and file servers and data, in order to comply with government regulations and simplify branch IT operations. Branch employee productivity is threatened as companies consolidate their branch office servers and applications into data centres, resulting in increased latency and poor response times from applications and data being delivered across the Wide Area Network. A major obstacle is the impact of latency, limited bandwidth and network packet loss on application performance. WAN optimisation and application acceleration technologies overcome these obstacles to provide enterprises with an easy way to consolidate distributed branch servers, storage and backup infrastructure, while ensuring high application performance to end users."

With IT managers continuing to look for ways to improve the way in which they handle a growing data deluge within their organisations, many are adopting storage technologies that provide cost-effective protection of their company's mission-critical information, regardless of where it resides. The Enterprise Strategy Group estimates 75% of corporate data is located outside of the data centre, with only 30% to 40% of this offsite data successfully backed up.

"Off-site data is subject to the same regulatory compliance and corporate governance requirements as that which resides within corporate headquarters," says Eran Farajun, executive vice president of Asigra, specialists in agentless remote backup and recovery software for remote office and branch office protection. Gartner predicts that organisations that choose one-off solutions to handle each regulatory challenge through 2007 will wind up spending 10 times more on compliance than those who take a more sustainable programmatic approach. Gartner also estimates that compliance management spending made up between 10% and 15% of IT budgets in 2006.

"To help combat runaway IT budgets, many companies are seeking more affordable software solutions and utility-computing services to store their data," comments Farajun. "System management software revenue is forecast to grow by 6.9 per cent annually through 2010, with software accounting for the largest portion of spending within the compliance infrastructure market. The overall managed services segment is expected to exceed the $31.4 billion in estimated revenue from 2006."

Industry analyst firm TheInfoPro has found that capacity at Fortune 1000 companies is doubling every 10 months, with the average installed capacity jumping from 198TB in early 2005 to 680TB in October 2006. "But data growth isn't restricted to enterprises. Small and medium businesses (SMBs) have the same backup and restoration requirements as larger firms. While there are a myriad of solutions available to choose from, companies may wish to consider one that allows them to manage data across a geographically dispersed environment, while only paying for the amount of storage under protection."

The upcoming year will also see the expansion of data reducing technologies, such as de-duplication, backup lifecycle management (BLM) and continuous data protection (CDP), which will seek to limit the volume of information needing to be saved, thereby reducing expenditures even more. "As companies continue to implement technologies that help them meet the intrinsic demands of data storage, 2007 looks to be another year of growth in both capacity and revenue for those in the storage and managed services industries," adds Farajun. "Purchases will be fuelled by actual need for additional storage space to keep pace with record levels of information being produced, satisfy regulatory compliance issues, protect mission-critical information from disaster, theft or loss and as a cost-reduction substitution for more expensive hardware solutions that continue to eat up IT resources."

As far as Plasmon is concerned, it expects to see more customers implementing multiple tiers of storage technology in the future. "Many are discovering that cheap SATA discs can't meet all of their storage requirements and create new burdens," says Steve Tongish, director of marketing (EMEA).

"Mixing different disk, tape and optical technologies provides a much more flexible and robust strategy. This is not a new trend, but it will gather momentum in 2007.

 There is real opportunity to provide compelling services that complement product offerings, as product availability is ubiquitous; value lies in the knowledge behind the products.

“Those in the storage market that take the time to develop a strong expertise on a focused topic will create new and more lucrative business opportunities."

2007 will be an entrepreneurial year in the storage industry, he feels, with a number of smaller technology players bringing innovative solutions to the market - and that means corporate acquisitions will also continue.

Adrian McDonald, VP and general manager UK & Ireland, EMC, lists a plethora of areas in which storage users will be challenged - and therefore the vendors in seeking to meet their needs and demands. This, he says, will embrace everything from "more information, more kinds of information, broader recognition of the strategic nature of this asset, more industry consolidation and competitive battles that are really information wars, more regulations governing its use, access, and retention. And more concerns about its security".

It's a weighty checklist, but shows how vibrant the industry has become - and the diverse ways in which it must respond to the challenges it faces, if it is to thrive. As John Greenwood, product sales director, NCE Computer Group (Europe), points out, "nothing stands still in our industry" and, if you don't move with it as an organisation, you are likely not to be around to tell the tale.

Greenwood sees this being a big year for data de-duplication - eliminating the replication and storage of identical files that co-exist within the IT architecture. This improves efficiency and also frees up much needed bandwidth when replicating data. "In effect, it overlaps with the storage resource management (SRM) generation that - whilst a logical and sensible idea to identify what is stored where, who it belongs to and how old it is - never really caught on," he states. This was largely because of the cost implications to run such an audit, whereas such SRM tools are now integral to the identification of files that co-exist.

"Perhaps the biggest challenge that we have still yet to see a solution for is of the management and movement of data held at remote sites. The crunch is that you simply can't make a low bandwidth link any faster than its limitation. And we still live in a world where the connectivity to remote sites, whilst having improved, still isn't good enough to move data across in any volume."

So what are the prospective solutions? "Perhaps providing remote access to storage using a virtual infrastructure is one possibility, with data replicated at block level or disk sector level being copied across the link. Alternatively, there are the tools that offer unrivalled compression of data to move it over the limited bandwidth. Typically, we've found that these are locked into specific disk 'solutions' so this doesn't always prove financially viable."

The other area that is gathering momentum, he says, is the 'appliance for compliance'. "Whilst legislation is still being largely overlooked in the vast majority of businesses, there are certain companies (typically with a global presence or household brand) that are taking this far more seriously. Government bodies are also seeing this as key to their data storage, paying specific attention to the individual laws for every aspect of their organisations."

He also expects the dramatic changes that have taken place in the disc array market to continue and evolve. "SATA storage can be found in 99.9% of businesses, specifically as the understanding of the data and where it is held is becoming more pertinent." SAS [Serial Attached SCSI] has found its feet, he argues, and is now viewed as the mid-enterprise class tier within the disc storage architecture, typically displacing SCSI or, in certain cases, Fibre-Channel disc technology. "Those in, and those coming into, the disc array market are concentrating on storage density and mixed drive types, such as SATA and SAS, within the same enclosure."

What about the more speculatively futuristic technologies? "Holographic storage is something that we've seen and would appear to represent a future in the storage market, although arguably its cost, footprint and demand will make it or break it as a format. There also appears to be a question as to whether it will be a consumer product - ie, in your new generation games console - or an IT data storage device. Personally, I can't see the technology having a huge impact in 2007. It's perhaps one for the crystal ball."

Steve Mackey, director of product marketing at Quantum, also sees data de-duplication as a major driver. In fact, he believes that it will emerge as the single most significant driver of the storage market in 2007.

"The technology will change the way in which users deploy disc storage throughout their businesses. Until now, primarily due to its low cost to capacity ratio, tape has dominated backup and long-term storage, with disc generally only used for short to mid-term storage.

“In 2007, however, data de-duplication will cause a shift in this relationship,” he predicts,”with disc being used more often as the initial target for backup and tape
for long-term retention.

“Using disc as a target for backup allows users to benefit from improved read and write speeds, and reliability of disc. De-duplication technology will allow longer retention times and replication of data over conventional networks, eliminating the need for physical transportation of tapes for disaster recovery." This, he adds, is due to the 10 to 50 times increase in the utilisation of disc capacity and network bandwidth achieved with de-duplication on redundant data such as backups.
Throughout 2007, compliance will also remain an important issue and will continue to be a sales driver.

"Legislation concerning the ways in which businesses store, protect and retain data is set to continue to evolve and affect a growing proportion of the market. Any business planning to invest in new storage hardware should take into account potential compliance issues that may affect their requirements in the near future."

And he also has a word of advice for those investing in new hardware, where businesses can rush decisions and fall into a number of potential pitfalls. "These can be avoided through accurately analysing future requirements. To do this, businesses should first of all avoid finding point solutions to current needs. Instead, they should carefully classify all data for storage to gain an idea of the types of storage they need. They then should examine future capacity and performance needs, taking into account expected growth and future operational requirements, including compliance issues. By this stage, they should have a fairly clear idea of their storage hardware requirements and will be able to sensibly invest in backup hardware that will serve them not only throughout 2007, but also for years to come."

In the past, organisations managed storage by focusing on the devices that housed their data, says Thomas Vernersson, president and co-founder of NORTHERN, a global software company and pioneering developer of Windows-based storage management software. "Today, companies are embracing the idea that the best way to manage storage is to manage the data stored."

Vernersson points to the growing interest being paid to the devices that house stored data, with what he describes as "a dramatic uptake of NAS technology". In fact, a recent Yankee Group survey found that 56% of companies with 250 to 499 employees deployed NAS storage. "Trends indicate an even greater proliferation of NAS devices and the reasons are obvious: a NAS device enables the organisation to easily and cost effectively increase capacity."

However, adding NAS devices to accommodate data growth is only a part of the solution. "If the mistakes of the past are to be avoided, when adding cheap hard drives was found simply to compound administration issues, adequate steps to manage the data stored on these NAS devices must also be taken. Managing storage devices is rudimentary second-generation SRM. Storage quotas protect hardware resources from reaching dangerous usage levels, storage reports predict when devices will become full. A third-generation of SRM solution is now emerging, a development that places the focus firmly on managing the content of these devices: managing the data. NAS is an ideal solution for SMBs, but storage will only ever be efficient and manageable when storage strategies include management of the data itself."

Will Trotman, senior product manager, Sony Europe, argues that when end users are considering data protection - and backup and restore hardware in particular - the ongoing question next year will be: "what is the best device to use to store my business backups?" New technologies will continue to challenge here, he says.
"Tape still remains the most popular choice, because it is a proven, cost-effective and long-life medium; but with its falling cost and instant access capability, hard disc continues to offer a reasonable alternative.

“A recent newcomer is the removable hard disc, boasting both the qualities of tape and disk. However, such technologies - and there are few - are still very new in the market and no long-term field reliability figures are available."

A new challenger to this area, Trotman believes, will come from the optical market in the form of Blu-ray Disc, which offers 50GB native capacity and backwards compatibility with DVD media.

"Whilst the technology is still considered fairly expensive, the expected demand from the consumer market will ensure that drive and media costs fall quickly. And with the high possibility of integration into many PC servers as a replacement for DVD drives, its challenge in the IT backup space has creditability."

Overall, his caveat to end users is that they should always be market aware, while also taking a longer-term view, rather than just change solutions to save a few hundred pounds. "Technologies and their vendors can come and go. In 1990, for example, there were 72 tape drive manufacturers and today there are just seven. Brand new technologies should be approached with caution, especially if from a vendor with a poor record for delivering products over time."

At Seagate, Alastair Stewart, channel director, EMEA, says the company expects the worldwide hard disc drive market to experience sustained unit and revenue growth in the year ahead, with particularly strong expansion in the consumer electronics (CE) and external storage segments. "Overall, we expect the industry revenues to grow from around $30 billion in 2006 to nearly $40 billion in 2009, with the CE market segment growing by approximately sixty per cent each year. The external storage market will see growth as more and more people recognise the importance of backing up their precious data and the convenience provided by portable storage devices in moving that content."

The implementation of perpendicular magnetic recording was one of the memorable achievements of the industry in 2006 and is something Seagate provides across all of its product families. "This technology represents a shift from a half-century of technological precedent to a new way of recording data to the disc media - standing data bits vertically on to the disc media, rather than horizontal to the surface as with traditional longitudinal recording - to deliver new levels of hard-drive data density, capacity and reliability," states Stewart. "The new data orientation also increases drive throughput without increasing spin speed by allowing more data bits to pass under the drive head in the same amount of time.

"In 2007, I expect we will see widespread adoption of the eSATA - external SATA - interface on notebook and desktop computers. This will enable users to enjoy the same levels of performance from an external hard drive as they do from their internal drive."

What is clear is that the pace of development across many areas of storage will not let up. The stakes are high and the competition is getting hotter. All in all, this will be yet another year when the industry steps into new and sometimes uncharted territory as it searches for the solutions that will further underpin and help to drive its operations. ST