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.