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General Information
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October 10, 2008
• Vol.30 Issue 41
Page(s) 1 in print issue
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The Future Of Storage
Developing Technologies & Data Retention Will Take Center Stage
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| Key Points
• Solid-state drive technology will come to the forefront, due in large part to its lower energy requirements and faster performance
• Data retention needs will drive demand for drives with increased capacity
• Data centers will require increased security and disaster recovery capabilities | | The next five years will hallmark the most dramatic changes in storage since the rollout of the first storage-area networks in the late ’90s. Key drivers of these changes will be the need for greater and greater performance; higher levels of security; longer-term, near-permanent storage of data; and the continuing expectation that data will survive in any kind of disaster with little or no downtime.
 Performance
According to Woody Hutsell, executive vice president of Texas Memory Systems (www.texmemsys.com), the need for speed will actually accelerate during the next five years, not just from increased demands from databases and email systems but primarily from increasingly virtualized server infrastructures that will see hosts virtualizing five to 10 times the virtual machines hosted today.
 With increasing demands from databases, email systems, and virtual hosts, the I/O performance will be stretched to the limits of mechanical drives and will be almost entirely replaced by SSDs (solid-state drives).
First, SSDs are ideal for this high-transaction, multitenant workload. With virtually no latency due to seek times, they will be a critical component in these future infrastructures.
Second, SSDs are more power-efficient per gigabyte, and, in the data center of the future, power efficiency will be vital as energy costs continue to soar. Trying to muster performance out of large groups of mechanical drives will be expensive not only from a hard cost perspective but also from a power- and space-utilization perspective.
Hutsell believes this change will occur during the next five years and will likely not be totally complete within that timeframe. There will be a gradual acceleration in SSD adoption rate during this time, accelerating to market dominance by year five.
Data Permanence
SSDs will be one of the key drivers toward data permanence. Solid-state technology will still be an expensive option, and the only data you will want on that platform is the most active set of data. Storage manufacturers and third parties will become increasingly adept at creating solutions that will transparently and automatically move data between the high-speed SSD layer and the high-capacity, longer-term data retention layer.
For example, Bruce Kornfeld, vice president of marketing at Compellent Technologies (www.compellent.com), says, “To reduce their administrative overhead and increase utilization, users should be able to reserve SSDs only for their most active data. We’re working to enable this for users because we see the ability like ours to understand and transparently move data at a block level between storage tiers to be the major driver in the broader adoption of solid-state disk.”
In addition to optimizing the high-speed SSD tier, the data permanence layer will have the responsibility to retain this inactive data for decades. Retention is motivated by current legal requirements and is understood as the primary asset of an organization. This asset must be retained, indexed, and mined for information that will be valuable to the organization.
A factor in this “store it forever” evolution will be the need to scale beyond anything that has been required before. For the small to medium-sized enterprise, a 1PB-plus data vault supporting a 1TB active data set will not be uncommon.
Dealing with storage systems of this size will require new thinking in RAID protection. In fact, Jered Floyd, founder and CTO of Permabit Technologies (www.permabit.com), goes so far as to pronounce RAID a dead technology. “RAID technologies are unsustainable in a 1PB model. Drive capacities are growing, while seek time and error rate are not keeping up, making the likelihood of data loss during RAID reconstruction almost certain with high-capacity drives. These problems will only get worse and demand new technologies for data protection,” says Floyd.
Increased Security
“In both tiers of storage, as well as user-transportable storage, security will be vital,” says Gary Streuter, vice president of marketing for CMS Products (www.cmsproducts.com). Data is virtually wide open today in storage. If a user walks away from his desktop without logging out, full access to that organization’s most valued asset is there for the taking. Within five years, encrypted file shares, which automatically resecure themselves after user inactivity, will be not only commonplace but demanded. On the portable storage side, not only the organization but also the users themselves will require encrypted USB or eSATA drives.
In addition, Streuter feels that this heightened level of sensitivity to security will lead to a host of file-auditing tools. “Over the next five years, fines associated with laws that exist today requiring notice of loss of sensitive data will be more aggressively assigned,” says Streuter. As a result, when a laptop or portable drive is lost or stolen, organizations will need the ability to report what was on those systems and who should be notified.
Site Protection
Finally, when it comes to data protection and disaster planning, expectations from users during the next five years will continue to increase. As high availability and data replication specialist SteelEye’s Senior Vice President of Product Management Bob Williamson (www.steeleye.com) puts it, “Users will come to expect zero downtime regardless of what the disaster is.”
The primary motivator of server virtualization projects was server consolidation and now is moving [toward] enabling cost-effective disaster recovery sites. The need to replicate more data at a lower cost is going to become more critical. As Williamson says, “the cost to get the data to the DR [disaster recovery] site has decreased as bandwidth has gotten less expensive, similar to how the cost to put hardware in the DR site has decreased as a result of server virtualization.”
Also, adds Williamson, “storage environments will continue to be heterogeneous, and users will choose host-based replication to give them an any-to-any replication strategy, all managed from a single interface.”
In five years, we will see a polarization of storage types, SSDs, and deep disk-based archives; it will all be very secure and automatically replicated to secondary sites. The key driver in all this will continue to be virtualization. The impact of virtualization on storage has already begun; the broadening of virtualization beyond just servers will continue to force innovation around the automation and simplification of the entire storage eco-system. 
by George Crump
Most Promising Technology: SSDs
Already being implemented in some data centers, SSDs (solid-state drives) are likely to have a big impact on the storage arena in the years to come. The technology is extremely power-efficient, which is increasingly important to SMEs as energy costs continue to rise. And while SSDs are somewhat pricey now, costs are likely to decrease as the technology is further developed.
Additionally, as the information stores data centers are required to maintain increase exponentially, SSDs’ access speed will be a boon to SMEs, whereas the performance offered by traditional mechanical hard drives has not increased fast enough to keep up with the drives’ skyrocketing capacities. |
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