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Follow UsThe fast changing dynamics of the storage industry would determine
a new set of technologies that are most likely to be in demand during 2006
Crystal
ball gazing can be hazardous at the best of times, more so if it concerns
something as dynamic as storage technologies. Therefore, any attempt to predict
the hot technologies of 2006 might sound slightly naïve, since there is no
guarantee that what you might expect to become hot during the year would not
turn out to be a cold turkey in only few months. After all, the path from hype
to hot is a slippery slope, strewn with technologies that, for one reason or
another, never reached the hot, must-have plateau.
Notwithstanding such
uncertainties, the odds are reasonably stacked in favor of a host of
storage-related technologies expected to make the perilous transition from hype
to hot in 2006. E-mail archiving, remote office support, SAS/SATA drives,
virtual tape, disk-based backup, and midrange arrays seemingly fit the bill.
While the degree of acceptance of each technology would obviously vary across
geographies, Indian enterprises, at least the large ones, would probably count
themselves amongst the most enthusiastic adopters. And why not, considering that
all technologies on the 2006 hot list promise to solve the storage problems many
of these companies have wrestled with for years.
E-Mail Archiving: The
growing agenda of regulatory compliances and subsequent scope for corporate
litigations would drive the process of indexing and storing e-mail messages and
their attachments in a way that makes it easy to search and retrieve a
particular message or group of messages addressing a given topic. Today's
informal approach followed by most enterprises whereby users set up folders in
Microsoft Exchange or other messaging systems would no longer be sufficient in
an environment regulated by SOX, HIPPA, Clause 49, and their brethren.
E-mail archiving tools
collect, index, store and search e-mail messages. While niche vendors such as
C2C Systems and Mimosa Systems, among others, have introduced e-mail search and
archiving products that augment the capabilities of Microsoft Exchange, the sign
of times is best reflected by bigger players like CA, IBM and Veritas (now
Symantec) acquiring and introducing e-mail archiving products. The repository
generated by mail archiving tools avoids the problem that tripped up Morgan
Stanley during 2005-an inability to produce a message that was however known
to exist.
Remote Office Support:
The growing proportion of mobile workforce in enterprises of all hues as well as
geographically separate locations would catalyze the deployment and adoption of
products and services such as remote replication, WAN accelerators and remote
vaulting. The biggest hurdle in the adoption of these technologies in India till
date used to be bandwidth, a complication that has been happily banished from
the Indian cyberspace of 2006.
This denouement would
ensure smaller vendors such as Asigra, Riverbed Technology and Softek Storage
Solutions gaining popularity in India. Large enterprises would be motivated by
the need to streamline and centralize data management and storage functions
performed at satellite locations. Not to mention a comprehensive DR/BCP policy
that would dictate the need to maintain copies of data at separate locations.
Even SMBs could bite the bullet, since most of these technologies are often
packaged as simple appliances and therefore would not overly strain their
limited IT budgets.
SAS/SATA Drives: After
undergoing long overdue, major upgrades over the past two years, Serial-attached
SCSI (SAS) and serial ATA (SATA) disk technologies are already figuring
prominently in disk buying decisions by almost every CIOs. That both the drives
have doubled their speeds-the first steps on roadmaps that will take them to
10Gb/sec and beyond-has been the biggest motivator. No wonder, the new SAS and
SATA drives are changing key storage dynamics, particularly in backup and
recovery.
The compatibility
between the new SAS and 3Gb/sec SATA II drives-SATA drives can plug into the
SAS backplane-also opens up new opportunities for tiered storage. Especially
SMBs who cannot afford different tiers of storage on different boxes would be
able to mix higher cost, higher performance SAS drives, and lower cost. Lower
performance SATA drives within the same array. While the 3Gb/sec SATA II drives
could become the standard for low-cost, second-tier storage and disk-based
backup, SAS with its enterprise-class features such as dual porting and full
duplex mode, could wean away a significant share of fiber channel drives.
Virtual Tape &
Disk-based Backup: The new SATA drives are also spurring interest in virtual
tape and disk-based backup. Although tape continues to be cheaper, falling disk
prices have brought the industry to the tipping point, making disk a viable
backup option.
Virtual Tape Libraries
(VTLs), which work with the existing tape backup software but use low-cost disk
rather than tape for storage, are growing in popularity as vendors rush products
to market. EMC, HP, IBM. and StorageTek (now owned by Sun) all now offer VTLs,
and most backup storage software vendors support virtual tape configurations.
The slow speed of tape
would drive more and more enterprises working on a 24x7 availability kind of
environment to add VTL to their backup processes. Not only would it reduce the
backup time, virtual tape could also prove to be less costly than buying more
tape silos as well as eliminate the need for more manpower to continually mount
and handle tapes, freeing them for other tasks. However, it would be premature
to expect VTL to replace tapes in 2006-cost benefits alone would ensure that
tapes continue to be used for offsite archiving.
Midrange Arrays: Though
EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, HP and IBM have been offering midrange storage arrays
for quite some time now, 2006 might just prove to be its year of reckoning as
the cost keeps getting lower, and the products keep getting better. For many
vendors, the midrange arrays now rival the top end in features, although not in
scalability, and at a much lower price. Many products are sporting fiber channel
disks, while some come with a mixture of SAS and SATA and offer sophisticated
replication, mirroring and management features.
With many Indian
enterprises, SMBs included, moving from a distributed DAS to a centralized SAN
environment, initially going for a midrange array and migrating to the top end
later is increasingly becoming a viable option. Not only does it merely streamline storage administration
while providing for future scalability, it also finally unravels the information
lifecycle management (ILM) conundrum helping enterprises set up tiers of storage
to make the most cost-effective use of their storage investments.