2013 Storage Trends Outlook by Active Archive Alliance

This article was written by Yvonne McGranahan on the blog of the Active Archive Alliance.

Here’s a look at what’s to come:

Continued Growth of Unstructured Data
Data will continue to grow at an exponentially rapid rate even as IT budgets continue to diminish. To meet this challenge, tape technology will play an increasing role as organizations seek storage solutions such as active archiving, which leverages tape’s many benefits including high capacity, reliability, low-cost, speed and ease of use.

File-based Storage Solutions Will Take Center Stage
New tape products such as LTO-6 and innovations such as LTFS will allow tape to be used as low cost NAS and will ensure tape’s increasing role in big data, cloud, HPC and other data intensive applications. Very integrated, tiered file storage options will become increasingly important as users have more media types they store data upon. As a result, there will be an increase in archive solutions using LTFS and potentially the adoption of LTFS as a standard for tape storage.

Increased Focus on Data Profiling
The use of rudimentary data profiling will become important for deploying effective storage management strategies. Understanding baseline file attributes for large data sets will be important for matching performance requirements to storage options. This allows storage administrators to architect solutions that meet their storage requirements and unlocks the inherent benefits of an active archive strategy that results in real, hard dollar ROI.
 
Data Security and Encryption at Forefront
The need for better data security and protection continues and LTFS and KMIP (Key Management Interoperability Protocol) together provide long-term data security, which can be used in all industries that have large capacities of data to archive. LTFS gives organizations the long-term security of an industry standard data format and KMIP provides the ability to protect (encrypt) their data on removable media using industry standard encryption key management.

Better Understanding of Active Archives and Their Value
The end user community will continue to better understand the difference between archive and backup and the value archives can bring to their storage strategies. As a result, active archives will increasingly be a strategic purchasing intention of CIOs as they grapple with implementing cost-effective methods to store, retain and retrieve data.

Alliance members Crossroads Systems, Fujifilm, FileTek, Spectra Logic and QStar contributed to this blog.