Five storage trends to watch

Steadily moving away from being a domain within IT, data storage is today a
critical business area-critical to the survival and growth of the enterprise.
However, storage technology is ever evolving and presents enterprises with new
options to choose from time and again. And, enterprises often find it difficult
to keep up with new technologies, let alone choose techno-logies that deliver
business value over a long period of time.

To reduce some of this mysticism surroun-ding storage technology, Dataquest
spoke to a few key vendors in the storage busi-ness and asked them what in their
view would be the lea-ding trends driving the sto-rage initiatives by
enterprises in the near future.

Primary Storage

The increasing imple-mentation of critical enter-prise applications like ERP,
CRM and data warehousing combined with a need to consolidate data storage
centrally for ease of management has accelera-ted the growth of networked
storage market in India. Falling hardware component prices are beginning to make
networked storage affordable even to medium and small enterprises. As Indian
businesses find ways to move from a predo-minantly DAS-based environment to a
SAN or NAS-based infrastructure, NAS will find increasing adoption in mid-sized
firms, driven largely by storage consolidation.

Backups

A competitive business environment means that performance demands from
storage infrastructure are only increasing by the day. For example, the sales
persons may demand to be able to update necessary information and retrieve
latest figures late at nights while on an outstation assignment. As business
uptime becomes increasingly dependent on IT uptime, supporting the same may mean
that backing up of data in a batch mode by shutting down primary systems at
times of low-usage may just not be possible now. And the growing volume of data
has added its own pressure on backup windows.

DR and BCP

An area of interest ever since the events of September 2001, Disaster
recovery and Business Con-tinuity Planning is finally garnering its fair share
of IT investments by enterprises in the last few quarters. Two new trends are
driving the uptake: companies with offshore custo-mers, particularly in software
services and BPOs face pressure from their customers to implement a sound DR
strategy. Also, CEOs of many large companies want to implement DR and BCP to
increase shareholders’ trust and value in their enterprise.

ILM

Information lifecycle mana-gement is already being hai-led as the biggest
direction for storage to move forward in near future. ILM builds on the premise
that latest sales data is far more critical to a business than last year’s
salary records, and makes a case of using different types of storage for
different types of data. It warrants use of high-end storage only for more
critical and valuable data, while keep-ing the remaining data in cheaper
storage. The strategy is accomplished by investing in multiple types of storage
devices from ultra-cheap to ultra-fast, and a software that auto-matically
transfers data from one type of storage to another-based on its receding
im-portance to enterprise. Implementing ILM is also often classified in seven
tiers.

Virtualization

Storage virtualization is the magical wand that could allocate the required
space to an application’s data at just the right time from what would appear
like a standardized pool of storage, but which in effect is hiding multiple and
heterogeneous storage devices-from different types of disk arrays, SANs, NAS
boxes to HBAs and switches. Virtualization can reduce the complexity of managing
storage infrastructure and reduce associated costs. True, universal
virtualization enables one to create volumes from any space on any storage
platform regardless of the vendor brand being used. Storage virtualization will
allow use of storage capacity by applications in both file-level as well as
block-level input/output.

Rishi Seth in New Delhi