2010, Year of Storage Solutions Across Multiple Tiers

Permabit Technology Corporation, provider of tiered storage solutions for the enterprise, outlined a series of predictions for the data storage industry in 2010. With IT budgets expected to remain flat and a lack of resources top of mind for every data center manager, Permabit believes the industry will adopt a more cost effective approach to address data storage growth. In 2010, Permabit sees a ‘New Normal’ occurring in the storage market which is driven by increased pricing pressures on storage vendors coupled with the need for more cost effective purchase and deployment of storage across multiple tiers.

Permabit sees the ‘New Normal’
as being driven by the following critical factors:

• The need to optimize utilization of existing storage
• Tight IT budgets and continued cost control management policies
• The availability of lower effective cost value tier storage
• Slow to no growth in the overall storage sector as a result of continued pricing pressures on primary storage vendors even with capacity demand increasing

Additional Predictions
being highlighted by Permabit for 2010 are:

• Dedupe Comes of Age – Driven by cost reduction and tight IT budgets, along with the broad acceptance and technology readiness; deduplication will become a requirement for all storage purchases – NAS and block level storage!
• Primary Consideration – Driven by the undeniable economics of data reduction, deduplication will be increasingly deployed in primary data stores. This will be enabled by advances in deduplication technology that no longer have an impact on access performance and that is highly scalable and can be seamlessly deployed.
• Virtual Bloat is Solved – Dedupe will be deployed across all storage tiers, solving the problem of redundant images and storage bloat.
• Getting Cloudy – Cloud storage will make inroads in enterprise private cloud deployments along with public clouds for consumer and the small to medium business market, but external enterprise clouds will face challenges in building customer adoption
• RAID Continues its Decline – Driven by the realization that RAID does not provide the scalability necessary to adequately protect today’s data stores, it will continue to atrophy as a data protection methodology. The move away from RAID will accelerate as 2 TB drives become more widely used and RAID will be supplanted by erasure coded highly scalable protection solutions that scale and recover much more effectively.

"This is the year when organizations can take back control of their information. Information will be optimized, lowering storage costs and increasing its value. IT organizations will benefit from fundamental advancements in dedupe, data protection and virtualization that offer unprecedented cost efficiencies. We call it information optimization realized," said Tom Cook, President & CEO, Permabit.