Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Top storage technologies for 2009

It’s time to ring in the New Year with the obligatory Top Storage Technologies for 2009. I’ve culled through dozens of picks from the vendor community, and the one that comes closest to my own predictions is from HP. So, according to me and HP, here are the hottest storage trends for this year, in no particular order:

Cloud-based storage is changing how companies commoditize and store the exponential amounts of data from video sharing, digital media and social networking sites. The need to store massive amounts of data with real-time access capabilities will change the storage industry in 2009 as we see a greater uptake in cloud-based storage solutions that address the challenges of data growth, but at a fraction of the cost of traditional storage infrastructures.

Data de-duplication. By drastically increasing disk utilization (some vendors claim data de-dupe ratios of 50:1 or more, although your mileage will vary), data de-duplication reduces storage costs and improves capabilities such as disaster recovery.

Solid-state disk (SSD) drives: In a recent InfoStor QuickVote reader poll, only 6% of the respondents were currently using SSDs; another 6% planned to purchase SSDs within the next six months; 14% within the next six to 12 months; and 74% had no plans to use SSDs. However, according to HP: “Once the industry addresses the cost premium and capacity challenges of SSDs, we will be one step closer to IDC’s predicted 70% compound growth rate for SSDs by 2012.”

Virtualized storage: IT organizations are looking to virtualize their storage environments to achieve the same benefits they’ve seen from server virtualization. This is leading to “shared data” architectures that ease storage management burdens.

Secure storage: Industry and government compliance requirements, as well as the need to protect sensitive data, will put storage-level security at the forefront in 2009. More and more users will opt for encryption, including drive-level encryption, to protect data.

Energy-efficient storage: Technologies such as data de-duplication and SSDs eliminate the need for unnecessary hardware to improve performance while reducing power consumption.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Dave
Nice summary. We are in the business of providing software platforms for cloud storage. Lot of interest in cloud storage at this moment - both private(behind the firewall cloud or corporate/internal cloud) cloud storage and public cloud storage services.

2009 will be the year that the first deployments of private cloud storage occur, as the technology becomes available from companies like EMC and ParaScale.

On the public side, Amazon S3 and a few others broke new ground in 2008. In 2009 this market is going to get crowded, with customers having a lot of choice (more on that at http://blog.parascale.com/?p=26 if you are interested).

Overall, the tough economy is forcing many IT organizations to look at cost-effective options and cloud storage falls into that bucket.

Best for 2009,
Sajai Krishnan
CEO, ParaScale