2013 Symantec Forecast in Storage

Symantec Corp. releases its forecast for 2012 in storage.

1.Flash storage replaces traditional hard disk storage
We believe there will be a huge increase in SSDs/flash storage adoption in 2013 due to the fact that it consumes significantly less power and reads up to 100x faster than traditional hard drives. Flash storage is a data repository that uses flash memory and will be trialed at nearly every Fortune 1000 enterprise within the year. Flash storage, with its rapid accessibility and reliability will begin to replace tier one storage in many data centers. These data centers will also look for new ways to maximize storage utilization on solid state storage to reduce costs of implementing flash storage, which will continue to decline.

2.Cloud outages get worse before getting better
There will be a significant increase in cloud outages in 2013, resulting in millions of dollars lost, yet companies will continue to pour resources into cloud offerings. The need to manage and protect data put in the cloud will lead to more adoption of backup and DR solutions. Cloud service providers will begin to innovate more secure and efficient recovery of data and applications to provide customers with safe clouds.
Infrastructures that have scaled quickly with hand-written code and that utilize inefficient shared resources will result in major outages and some black eyes for the cloud computing market. With the rest of industry we see cloud adoption continuing at an unprecedented rate. However, companies of all sizes will need to adopt better cloud management tools to protect their data because cloud outage problems will get worse before they get better.

3.The 100% virtualized organization
becomes more commonplace
The market share of hypervisor vendors will begin to balance out between the largest vendors, with each taking close to an equal market share as the space continues to grow exponentially. Organizations of all sizes will evaluate and adopt multiple hypervisors into their virtualization and computing environments.
This hypervisor diversity will cause specific hypervisor point tools to be ripped out and replaced by platforms with more capabilities that support multiple hypervisors, physical, virtual, snapshot and cloud based infrastructures for backup, recovery and management. This will lead to more organizations becoming 100% virtualized and using multiple hypervisors in both testing and production environments.
The result will be better disaster preparedness. Virtualization and cloud computing work hand-in-hand to improve disaster preparedness, with the ability to have off-site storage and physical machines quickly available in a virtual environment if a disaster were to occur. Symantec research shows that the adoption of server virtualization improves disaster preparedness.

4.Backup Windows will get shorter
iTunes has a feature that finds duplicate songs and only stores them once on a hard drive. This feature is called deduplication, and it is in many IT solutions. Backup vendors will reduce the backup window by providing backup appliances that have deduplication built in and that will only store duplicated information once.
In addition, vendors who sell SSD arrays will integrate inline and client-based deduplication through appliances to further reduce the TCO. This will not only shorten the backup window, but increase the adoption of integrated backup appliances.
As deduplication becomes a mainstream feature, integrated backup appliances will see large adoption and combine many features including deduplication, backup software, replication, snapshots, security and cloud integration in a single appliance. Because they are in a single appliance, this will speed up the backup window.