Trends in Information Storage and Management

The evolution



Most people who are not familiar with the information storage technology

closely, have a perception which is very simplistic of the technology. They

believe that it is all about a bunch of disks on which your data is stored. But

over the years,  technology has become extremely sophisticated evolving into

various segments, making it impossible for one person to manage different jobs

to be accomplished across these different segments. IDC says that in the next 4

years, the size of information is going to experience an overall growth of about

5 times. Everything else will evolve and will be upgraded and replaced but at

the end of the day , information that organizations or individuals create cannot

be upgraded. It has to be carried forward until it has value.

Earlier information was stored in disk drives, which are attached as

appendages to computing platforms. With the huge growth of information,  over a

period of time it, became impossible to store all this information within the

computer systems. Then  arose the need to store data on network storage  which

are storage devices outside the computers and which got connected to the

computer over a network, where a number of computing platforms could then share

this storage device. Thus Network storage came into vogue and today most

organizations because of the huge growth in terms of  information assets,

deployed  Network Storage devices. This means that the way organizations have to

now manage information and design their information infrastructure strategy  has

become far different  from the way it was done earlier.

Trends in information storage and management



In the past, it was primarily  the corporate sector that created

information. But over the last 6-7 years, we have started seeing a big shift

where more info is created by individuals than by corporates.  Though  majority

of data is being created by individuals — like emails to videos to text

messages,  etc — management of this information is still majorly done by

corporation. For example, if we upload a video on Youtube, we are actually

placing it on someone else's server. This means that Youtube has to manage this

information in a way that it is available to millions of people.

The biggest challenge that an organization faces nowadays is managing the

growing information. Some of the technologies which are helping us achieve this

are -

• Virtualization : This technology is helping us in reducing
  
  complexities and enabling cost cutting.
• Cloud computing : This is enabling hiding of the complexity of the
  
  apps and business processes from the underlying hardware.
• Data deduplication: A compelling technology which is helping in
  
  making sure that similar info doesn't  get stored multiple number of times.
  
  It ensures that one piece of info is stored very effectively in a way that it
  
  is optimally made available. For example : A 10 terabyte can be de-duplicated
  
  to 1 or 2 terabyte.
• Automation : With the huge growth of info it is becoming very
  
  difficult to manage the infrastructure itself. Information is going to grow 4
  
  to 5 times in the next few years,  but  organizations cannot employ 5 times
  
  the number of people. Neither can the IT budget  be increased by 5 times. So
  
  how to automate this process and how to optimize it would be the next big
  
  questions that the organizations will be ponder.

 Need for Information Storage and Management professionals



The academia in Computer Science and Electronics has been teaching computer

architecture, operating systems and data bases but the 4th leg of the stool

which is information management is missing.  There is a huge gap in terms of

talent pool and the requirement of the industry of professionals who could

manage information. Multiple areas of specializations have evolved in this

segment.

Now in the area of information storage and management  we are looking at

segments like architecture of system itself;  connecting the systems to each

other or the servers etc, which is where Storage Area Networking, NAS,  Fibre

Channel Over Ethernet (FCOE is coming up in a big way and we expect it to be a

trend changer in the next few years.) etc come in.  Then there is the challenge

of keeping the data up and running all the time — which is called as business

continuity. This involves technology  that helps not only  in protecting the

data but ensuring its availability 24*7. Then there are technology focusing on

backup recovery, archiving, data de-duplication etc. Other technologies are in

the areas of storage virtualization and proactive information management.

Industry Trend



A positive trend that is being observed across the industries in the last 4

years is that companies are dedicating more and more staff to the function of

information storage and management. Earlier there was not even a storage

management group. It used to be  part of some other group like Operating Systems

Management .  Even job titles in the area of storage management were not

standard. But now specialization are emerging and job titles in this area are

emerging - like storage admin, systems admin, backup, recovery officials,

operations managers, architects etc. Professionals with expertise in this domain

are required but there is great shortage of skilled pros, which is a opening up

great job opportunities. Even people who are in the industry for more than a

decade are now realizing that there is a significant gap in their knowledge too.

“You may be interested in:”

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2.      Managing information over years 
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