Fundamental Changes in 2009 Impacting How Storage Is Acquired and Utilized

Permabit Technology Corporation, in scalable, data-reduced storage for enterprise archiving, outlined a series of predictions for the data storage industry in 2009. With IT budgets set to decline or remain flat, coupled with current economic conditions, the experts at Permabit believe the industry is in store for some fundamental changes that will dramatically impact how storage is acquired and utilized going forward.

• Primary Storage gets Devalued and Right-sized. The demand for a systematic change to the way companies store critical data has been increasing for several years and yet the solution offered by the storage industry has continued to be throwing more legacy hardware at the problem. In light of today’s economic conditions and tight IT budgets, businesses are finally saying no to this approach and are evaluating and deploying products that offer radically lower cost and higher performing solutions.
• Forget Virtual Sprawl, Here Comes Dedupe Sprawl. Businesses will feel the pain of the deduplication ‘threshold’ where dedicated hardware appliances and virtual tape libraries (VTLs) fill up, requiring additional purchases of expensive hardware or forklift upgrades. The impetus for dedupe will evolve as deduplication for backup hits this wall. Users will realize that dedupe for backup isn’t solving the bigger problem of continually backing up mountains of primary storage-based static information, as it just addresses a lesser symptom of the need to reduce the amount of space redundant backups consume.
• RAID Gets Exterminated. As multi-tiered storage continues to evolve, SANs will become more complex, unified networks will emerge and, as newer and larger drive technologies such as 1 TB drives take root, RAID as a data protection technology will become irrelevant. Advanced data protection schemes based on Erasure Coding technology for long term reliable data storage will take hold putting additional pressure on legacy solutions depending on RAID.
• Regulatory Pressures Accelerate. Regulations will continue to increase and emerge as a result of the fallout from the Wall Street crisis and pressures from the new administration to hold more data for longer periods of time.Government actions will put new demands on IT requiring organizations across industries to keep information online and readily accessible which will in turn accelerate storage growth.
• Cost becomes the driving issue. IT will look beyond the traditional, high-cost storage vendors. Smart companies will put a premium on, and may limit their purchases to, flexible, innovative, and easy-to-deploy solutions that deliver immediate cost-savings. At the same time, businesses will demand storage solutions that also deliver advanced features for deduplication, self-healing, thin-provisioning, encryption and Write Once Read Many (WORM) that can handle massive data pools.

"The reality is that the storage industry as a whole has been perpetuating an ongoing problem for many years now. The demand for a systematic change to the way companies store critical data has been increasing and yet the solution continued to be throwing more legacy hardware at the problem. In light of today’s economic conditions and declining levels of IT support, businesses are finally saying no to this approach and are looking for new vendors that offer lower cost, higher performing solutions," said Tom Cook, President & CEO, Permabit.

"In 2009 we expect greater recognition from business that storage has become a commodity, and that legacy technologies have reached their technical limits. With the proliferation of 1 TB and larger disk drives, it is clear that RAID is no longer an effective data protection mechanism. Next generation technologies, such as RAIN-EC, will be mandatory in order to provide the level of protection, reliability and recoverability that will be needed for long term storage of information on disk," said Jered Floyd, Chief Technology Officer, Permabit.

"Economic conditions in 2009 are going to necessitate that companies carefully consider the viability of their current data storage solutions. While in the past certain cost inefficiencies could be overlooked in the name of getting the job done, every dollar will be closely scrutinized moving forward to ensure that maximum value is achieved at every level of the data storage process. Companies will look to replace high-cost, customized products with high-performance solutions that can cost-effectively scale to support the massive quantities of data that enterprises must manage," said Eric Burgener, Senior Analyst & Consultant, TANEJA Group.