Our appetite for creating, gathering, and storing data continues to grow and grow and grow. The huge growth of videos, pictures, audio, social media and other unstructured data is taxing the storage systems of many data centers.
In addition other trends are impacting storage, including Cloud computing, virtualization, energy costs, economics and performance. Businesses also are increasingly needing to keep multiple copies of data for regulatory compliance. These trends continue to put pressure on the storage infrastructure. As a result, CIOs and IT departments are looking to storage vendors to help them store more data in a smaller footprint, store more copies of data in different locations, and keep more copies of data for longer periods of time.
Let’s face it, CIOs are focused on cost reduction. The cost of storage for most enterprises remains a high component of the overall cost of a datacenter, even though the cost of storage per gigabyte continues to drop. More storage means more drives, which consume more datacenter space, power, and cooling resources, as well as human resources. In this environment, CIOs will be interested in solutions that help reduce storage costs or improve efficiency of existing storage assets.
In 2011, storage vendors must continue to seek ways to deliver storage more efficiently while reducing acquisition and operational costs, improving time to market, and reducing complexity. Storage vendors will be pushing CIOs to purchase technologies such as Thin provisioning, Data deduplication, Automated tiering, Flash technology, Solid State drives, and Virtual tape.
Analyst Perspectives
A review of analyst sites provides some analyst perspectives on the importance of storage as a trend.
“Data growth is the biggest data center hardware infrastructure challenge for large enterprises. Sixty-two percent of respondents reported that they will be investing in data archiving or retirement by the end of 2011 to address the data growth challenge.” - Gartner (link)
“Despite technologies that will increase storage efficiency, enterprise data will continue to expand by more than 40% a year. Enhanced performance requirements, coupled with the need to reduce power and capacity costs, will drive the creation of new storage technologies and services.” – Gartner (link)
“The emergence of cloud-based application and computing services is already having a profound impact on the storage industries” – IDC (link)
“Three Key Trends in Storage
- Migration to smaller (2.5in.), more energy efficient enterprise-class hard disk drives (HDDs)
- Greater utilization of existing storage capacity;
- Continued adoption of solid state drives (SSDs) and various other storage efficiency technologies (e.g., data deduplication, compression, and thin provisioning).” - IDC Oct 2010 (link)
Tony Pearson’s “Future Storage Trends” Deck
Tony Pearson is a Master Inventor and Senior Managing Consultant for the IBM System Storage product line at the IBM Executive Briefing Center in Tucson Arizona. Tony blogs regularly at “Inside System Storage”. Here is Tony’s deck on future storage trends.
Drivers of this Trend
- Data and content creation growth continues
- IT organizations are keenly focused on reducing costs.
- Power, cooling and space efficiency challenges.
- Compliance and litigation support.
- Risk mitigation.
Inhibitors/Challenges
- Utilizing available capacity
- Cutting power and cooling costs
- Reducing redundancy of data
- Reluctance to experiment with online storage
Implications
- Technologies that help reduce storage costs or improve efficiency of existing storage assets will be in demand
- Technologies to watch include Thin provisioning, Data deduplication, Automated tiering, Solid State drives, Virtual tape and Flash Memory
For More Information
- CIO.com: Storage
- Forrester: Storage (search) and Storage Hardware
- Gartner: Servers and Storage
- IBM: System Storage
- IDC: Storage Systems and Storage and the Cloud
- InfoTech: Storage
- InfoWorld: Data Explosion and Storage
- Wikipedia: Data Storage Device and Computer Data Storage and Solid-State Drive