EnterpriseStorage Technologies: The Way Ahead

So far, most of the action in storage has been towards

pulling storage resources out of individual machines and placing them on the

network. The move has been from direct attached storage to network attached one,

and eventually to a completely separate storage area network. On one side, this

evolutionary process has helped consolidate storage resources, and given

organizations the much-needed space for their growing data. On the other side,

it's also opened up a Pandora's box of new challenges. For instance, now

there are so many different types of storage devices that it's become a

challenge to get them to talk to one another seamlessly. 

What's needed now is a set of

technologies that can manage them; something that sees all

storage resources as a single pool, and allocates it automatically to

applications and servers as the need arises. Not only that, but now you also

need technologies that can seamlessly add more storage to this pool as and when

needed, and it has to be as easy as joining a few Lego blocks. As data volumes

increase, the storage pool shouldn't slow down by the inertia of its own mass.

So interfaces between different resources have to be designed such that they can

keep the data flow consistent. Therefore, lots of work is required on the

interface technologies for storage networks. They must be able to converse in

the same language.

Besides this, work also has to happen on the data management

front. Technologies are needed that can differentiate data based on its

relevance, and move out what's not needed to slower storage devices. It has to

be intelligent enough to determine when the data would need to be retrieved

again, if at all. This has to happen fast enough else you'll end up having one

big blob of useless data.

Data growth also poses another

challenge, of security. For this you need technologies that

can differentiate data based on its criticality. Highly critical data needs a

more secure storage space than moderately critical one. You need technologies

that can control access to different storage pools. All this may sound

impossible, but the technologies that we're going to talk about in the

following pages aim to address all these objectives. Storage virtualization for

instance aims to convert the storage resources into an easy to manage pool,

whereas SAS or Serial Attached SCSI aims to get all the interconnects right.

Disk based backup devices aim to improve the speed of data backup so that the

storage pool always remains agile. Likewise, e-mail archiving solutions are

trying to manage the ever-growing volume of e-mails in organizations. As e-mail

is being increasingly used as a business communication tool, you can't afford

to lose any of it. At the same time, you can't let it lie on every

individual's PC or even on the mail server. Hence, e-mail archiving is the

solution.

Similarly, there are technologies that aim to pack more

storage capacity in lesser space. This is happening on existing hard drives, as

well as newer technologies like holographic and optical storage. Security is

another concern. Now that storage is present directly on the network, it needs

more stringent security measures.

So if you think that all the action is over in the storage

world, think again. It's far from over.  In fact, it's just begun.

Anil Chopra, Rinku Tyagi, Sujay V Sarma and Swapnil Arora