Was There Fundamental Shift in Storage Industry Behavior?

Permabit Technology Corporation issued a review of its 2009 data storage industry predictions. Back in January, Permabit predicted 2009 would be the year when businesses would stop treating the symptoms of storage problems and instead addressed the cause of its data storage problems. We boldly predicted the industry was in store for some fundamental changes that would dramatically impact how storage was acquired and utilized. Twelve months later, check out how we did.

Prediction: 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 solutions offered by the storage industry has continued to be throwing more legacy hardware at the problem.
Reality: Primary storage was greatly devalued in 2009! Vendors dramatically dropped prices on high-priced Tier 1 storage in an attempt to maintain account control and associated revenue. Emerging storage vendors countered with space optimization technologies, such as data deduplication, and gained market share as customers looked for smarter ways to store more data in a smaller footprint at a more cost-effective price point.

Prediction: 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.
Reality: Dedupe vendors who focused on backup continue to battle scalability limitations. Even their ‘higher capacity’ models are limited in scalability. Their first generation architectures simply cannot scale to meet the demands of large scale enterprises. Dedupe 2.0 addresses this problem by making dedupe ubiquitous and providing massive scalability that is necessary for today’s increasingly larger data stores.

Prediction: 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 1TB drives take root, RAID as a data protection technology will become irrelevant.
Reality: We are ahead of the curve here. 1TB and 2TB drives were introduced in 2009. Larger capacity drives continue to make RAID obsolete as an effective data protection technology. Increasing recovery times and bit errors on rebuild using RAID technologies have prompted many industry analysts to call for new data protection approaches that can scale and deliver the protection needed for today and into the future.

Prediction: Regulatory Pressures Accelerate. Regulations will continue to increase and emerge as a result of the fallout from the Wall Street crisis and anticipated pressures from the new administration to hold more data and for longer periods of time.
Reality: While many new regulations did not get finalized in 2009 due to the economic climate, many are in the development stages for healthcare and financial services. Pressure to retain data will continue to build in these two markets and increase the need for flexible, compliant storage that can adapt rapidly to evolving regulations.

Prediction: 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.
Reality: Increasingly businesses are adopting a ‘flight to efficiency’ model that moves beyond the implied safety of buying from the traditional high cost storage suppliers that can immediately and dramatically impact their bottom line costs.

"Cost efficiency and storage optimization were the drivers for storage innovation and adoption in 2009. The drive for cost efficiency we saw in 2009 will accelerate in the coming year," said Tom Cook, President & CEO, Permabit.