Storage: Long Live Data!

Data growth in any organization is an irreversible process. You can control

and manage data, but you can't reduce it. Hence, there will always be the need

for efficient ways of storing and managing data. Since data is generated by

umpteen types of applications in zillions of formats, some pretty innovative

ways are required for storing it. That's why storage has always remained such a

hot topic, and it will continue to remain so as long as there's growing data.

Market drivers



The ever increasing amount of data brings with it not only requirements for

more storage capacity, but also issues of security, physical space for hosting

more storage devices, concerns of managing them, the speed of accessing data,

and much more. So much so that storage has become the driver for innovation

across so many industries. It has provided an opportunity to the software

development world for creating applications to store, back up, retrieve, index,

and search data. It has given the security industry an opportunity to find new

ways of securing the growing volumes of data.



The storage industry itself is coping with the challenge of cramming higher
storage capacity in smaller form factors. The growing volume of data is also

creating opportunities in the storage management and virtualization space.

Transcend Jet Flash V90C USB Flash drive

Even the consumer electronics industry is banking on storage, because most

consumer appliances and even digital gadgets require lots of it.

MP3 players, smartphones, digital cameras and camcorders, Digital Video

Recorders, are just a few examples that require storage.Plus, storage is also

driving niche markets like IP Surveillance.

Hot trends this year



We've had a pretty eventful year as far as storage goes. Several foundation

stones have been laid this year that will set the tone for things to come in the

future.

While the trend of increasing capacities and reducing costs in hard drives

has been around for a long time now, this year they finally hit the 1 TB mark.

In fact, the competition to bring out higher capacity drives has become very

similar to the GHz wars of the past in microprocessors, which continued until

they reached the limit. Thankfully, hard drive capacities have not yet reached

their limits. We'll see capacities beyond 1 TB in a single hard drive in the

coming years.

1 TB Hitachi Deskstar drive

Solid State storage drives also hit the market this year, and many laptop

vendors launched their models with them. So imagine a laptop with no magnetic

hard drive-just a single solid state drive with flash memory inside and a SATA

interface. The technology behind high capacity solid state drives is NAND, which

stands for 'Not AND'. In the digital world, NAND is a kind of logic gate.

So in effect, storage has become even more ubiquitous than before. Just about

every industry demands it today for different applications. In enterprises,

branch office automation led to the need for anytime anywhere access to data,

which made the concept of Wide Area File Services more popular. Data center

consolidation and infrastructure centralization led to greater demands for more

storage and backup. The need to standardize and comply led to the popularity of

email archival solutions, and even new data encryption technologies.

Network Attached Storage, or NAS for short, saw terrific growth this year. In

fact, the interesting thing about this market was that NAS boxes became

available for everyone, right from personal users to data centers.

Interestingly, 1 TB NAS for personal use or for small offices became commonplace

this year.

Information Lifecycle Management solutions were also on top of the storage

purchase chart for many enterprises. Likewise, several other storage terms were

pretty common place this year. There was a lot of interest in Continuous Data

Protection or CDP for instance. With growing amount of content, organizations

started considering content and document management solutions.

Transcend Jet Flash V90C USB Flash drive

Key Predictions for the future



Now we come to the exciting part. What all can you expect in the storage

arena next year. So here's our list of predictions to help you be prepared for

next year:

Storage Virtualization implementations will rise



This is one of the most talked about areas in storage for a long time, and

has not been able to take off as well as its cousin in the server world. This

year saw some traction in storage virtualization, with vendors introducing many

new products and early bird implementations. So the momentum has just started,

and we're likely to see a lot more action in storage virtualization next year.

While considering storage virtualization, don't get blinded by its benefits.

Look at the other side as well. That's because it's not as easy as adding an

abstraction layer on top of your existing heterogeneous storage infrastructure

and have a virtualized storage environment. Be prepared to add more storage

equipment to manage your existing ones. Likewise, there are many different ways

of doing storage virtualization, and choosing the right one requires a

discussion in itself.

Solid State drives will become more commonplace



We all know that solid state memory is much faster than magnetic memory. It

has no moving parts, runs at much higher speed, and is not affected by wear and

tear. That's why RAM is faster than a hard drive. However, solid state memory is

also much more expensive, which is why we don't see everyone rushing to replace

all magnetic storage with it. But there are quite a few interesting developments

in this area. Many notebooks vendors this year started shipping their products

with solid state drives inside. A race has started amongst memory manufacturers

to introduce higher capacity solid state drives, with the latest being A-Data's

128 GB SSD.

Currently, if you were to buy a laptop with a SSD inside, then you have to

shell out at least 40-50K extra for it. But the growing competition amongst

flash drive manufacturers and economies of scale will eventually bring down

prices, and you might find lots of SSD based notebooks in the market next year.

The advantages are many. SSDs are thinner, lighter, and faster, which should

improve system performance, make notebooks lighter and perhaps more power

friendly as well.

Full disk encryption based drives will emerge for storage security



One of the biggest challenges most organizations are facing today is

securing their ever growing volumes of data. This is becoming even a bigger

concern with so many laptops being used amongst organizations. Plus of course

there's all the data being backed up to tape drives. All this data in computers,

which is not travelling across a network is known as data at rest. The answer to

doing this is to encrypt it. There are many ways of doing this, and we've seen

many attempts at it over the past few years with vendors introducing various

types of solutions for doing so. There are software programs that encrypt data

on the fly, and even appliances that encrypt data before backing it up. This

year however, another technology has started gaining ground, which aims to build

encryption capabilities within the hard drive itself, a concept known as

Full-Disk Encryption or FDE. This is currently being backed up by Seagate, IBM,

and LSI, and even IEEE is creating a management standard, called 1619.3, to

ensure interoperability.

If everything goes well, then you should see FDE based drives shipping next

year. The logic behind having FDE based drives is also quite strong. If the

logic of encrypting all data lies within the hard drive controller itself, it

will improve performance. Moreover, even as more drives get added, the

performance won't degrade because each drive will be handling its own

encryption.

Maxtor Onetouch NAS box

VTLs will grow in popularity



This is one area that's becoming strong competitor to tape based backup.

Virtual Tape Libraries will become more popular next year, as vendors gear up

with more offerings.

Storage has become so ubiquitous and there have been so many developments

around it that one can go on and on talking about them. But we'll end the

discussion here and bring you more news on it in our forthcoming issues.