Top Ten Storage Predictions for 2012

 Previously at Enterprise Strategy Group and NetApp, Quantum Corp.‘s Chief Technology Evangelist David Chapa has 25 years of enterprise backup and recovery experience which have been utilized in roles ranging from sales to product to marketing leadership positions. He is the co-author of Implementing Backup and Recovery: The Readiness Guide for the Enterprise published by Wiley Technology Publishing.

Quantum Predictions for 2012

1. Scale-out storage adoption will become much more pervasive
It won’t just be for HPC environments anymore. Customers are looking for higher value and return out of their investments. Scale-out will be key to match both performance and capacity requirements for customers looking to achieve a faster ROI.

2. Definition of the cloud will begin to stabilize
Many will realize the importance of having tape as part of the big cloud story. Tape isn’t dead; it is simply being positioned differently to meet customer requirements.

3. Data growth
Yes, it’s been on everyone’s top 10 predictions for years – this is not as much of prediction, but a statement. Unstructured data is the culprit, but business analytics and business intelligence will see significant increases in 2012 and beyond.

4. Life sciences are coming to Big Data
Big Data has no idea what will hit it when the bio tech/life sciences field starts to accelerate its creation of data for clinical research. Genomic sequencers are becoming more and more affordable, which means more and more data can be created in a much shorter time. This helps labs (both small and large) achieve greater relevance in the field – which means massive amounts of data will need to be managed across multiple tiers of storage.

5. Big backup and recovery changes
Backup applications have always been a very ‘sticky’ application in customer environments, and virtualization offers customers a choice to change how they think about backup and recovery. New, thinner and more integrated approaches will be the revised look of data protection in a virtualized world. Deduplication will become even more critically important to efficiently and effectively protect these infrastructures without compromising on performance or oversubscribing secondary storage to overcompensate for architectural deficiencies.

6. Mobile devices aren’t just for talking
Data delivery, data access, application mobility and data mobility – however it is framed – will begin to take a firm hold in our IT industry. Much more work will be done on these devices in 2012, and we will begin to see how these devices will change the way business is conducted. From IT management to the field sales reps, these mobile devices will not only create more data but also deliver data in a much more meaningful and complete manner.

7. Supply and demand is alive and well
We are seeing significant drop in prices
Storage is becoming more and more affordable to the masses. Home office users now have several terabytes of data stored locally and face similar challenges to the enterprise: how to manage and protect this data. Small business cloud services will continue to emerge, accelerating cloud adoption even more at this tier, but the enterprise will continue to struggle with the public cloud.

8. The public cloud will gain traction
Security, access and control continue to be the barriers of entry for the public cloud to gain enterprise acceptance. The year 2012 will need to focus on how these three barriers can be broken down in order for the enterprise to begin to adopt the public cloud much more readily.

9. Thinking globally – but from a very different perspective
Crowd-sourcing is, and will, continue to grow. Next year could very well see this begin to mature and have real, serious impact on IT, how data centers are managed and beyond.

10. Block and file are so passé
The year 2012 is poised to be all about object-based storage.