IBM’s Top Storage Predictions for 2011

Here are the 2011 storage trends according to IBM Corp.:

1) Cloud Storage in 2011: hype, innovative and reality  
There’s a lot of excitement around cloud computing with limitless computational resources; better planning and forecasting; and more flexibility to meet unique user demands. However, implementation for customers has been hampered by the combination of stagnant budgets and quickly growing data as storage capacity continues to grow at a rate of nearly 60 percent per year, according to IDC. As a result, IT professionals need to carefully consider how to best take advantage of cloud storage to meet the unceasing demand for capacity.

Among the different cloud models – private, public, and hybrid – public cloud usage of storage by enterprises will grow the slowest as people are concerned about privacy of their critical information. According to Gartner, through 2012, Global 1000 IT organizations will spend more money building private cloud computing services than on offerings from public cloud-computing service providers.

Although adoption will be slow, vendors who aren’t investing in cloud storage solutions will fall behind the curve. And, as data continues to grow exponentially, customers will eventually seek out vendors who can not only outsource storage, but can fully manage and host their cloud environments.

2) Status quo won’t do;
data deluge and economic downturn forces innovation
Every day 15 petabytes of new data is created. For many businesses, this type of growth outpaces budgets by magnitudes. Limited by budget cuts, many have resorted to point solutions, causing disparate and inefficient processes.

Client demands are forcing the industry to innovate based on their needs with solutions that:

• Integrate virtual storage with other virtual system elements (servers and networks) to create fully virtual systems;
• Lower cost of technologies, with software aggregation to create large scale, high performance, or high availability solutions; and
• Improve system efficiency with real time compression, deduplication and data migration.

3) As infrastructure converges, software is the glue
Service management software is essential in ensuring that the IT infrastructure maps to business policies. With this, the demands on storage increases as the categorization and access to data ensures the right resources are being applied to meet different business needs. The key differentiator will be providers that can offer this service management layer with servers, storage, software and networking under one holistic offering.

The objectives of the Service Management layer are:

• Adjusting operation of the infrastructure against the business goals and policies
• Improving responses to hardware failures, new policies, or new business opportunities
• Optimizing efficiency in the use of infrastructure assets 

4) Data placement will get smarter, because it has to
Data is growing beyond IT budgets’ ability to provide storage to keep it in. At the same time, there is a strong desire to use data as a tool for business innovation while meeting regulatory requirements for data security, retention and access. This means prioritizing massive amounts of different types of data. For example, hot data’ is data that clients need ready access to like purchasing trends or energy use data that feeds analytics engines. ‘Cold data’ on the other hand is data that isn’t likely to be needed right away, like data that needs to be stored due to government regulations such as HIPAA, for example. Managing data with different priorities and time sensitivities requires tiered storage that enables clients to manage critical and secondary data differently. Clients will increasingly mix various storage technologies – sold state drives, flash, disk and tape storage – to achieve the right mix.