I was asked a question: how is the storage industry doing? In one word – Great! Information is growing at a terrifc pace in organisations which are creating a wealth of knowledge on one hand but causing information management challenges on the other. Storage industry is creating storage networking technologies to store, access, protect, automate, virtualise and leverage this information created in existing IT infrastructure or future data centers.

The year 2009 was very challenging with the global economy in a recessionary mode. However the future of storage looks great with growth of digital data growth in all walks of life, both personal as well as work-related. For example, social networking sites are creating peta bytes (PB - 1015) of data every week, millions of videos are getting uploaded on You Tube every day, organisations send billions of email every day with mega bytes of attachments, banks transact millions of records every day, public sector is digitizing data at an unprecedented rate and many more industries are joining this digital revolution. Home networking has tremendous growth: a recent survey showed that by 2013, an average home will create 2.2 TB data totaling up to 9 TB, out of which 5 TB will be commercial content. The other industry growing in tandem is security, as whatever data is created needs to be secured from crooks who are eyeing personal and company information as it is the life blood of organizations today.

Let us look at some future storage industry trends. CIOs and IT managers are still playing very cautious as economic recovery is on cards. At the same time, a survey conducted in Jan 2010 by Baird Technology Research indicated that storage was the number one area of IT spend in 2010, followed by virtualisation. Another recent survey from Goldman Sachs in Nov, 2009 showed pent-up demand for storage in 2010 much ahead of PCs and servers. At the same time, organisations have three key concerns apart from security and privacy to manage this information growth and avoid an implosion: how to keep costs down even as data grows; how to manage complexity in their information and virtual infrastructures; and how to comply effectively with internal organisational policies, IT governance and government requirements.

Virtualisation adoption is picking up speed as organisations are moving from physical to virtual infrastructure. Virtualisation is making hardware a software, you can fy your servers anywhere in the IT infrastructure. It saves a lot of costs in terms of servers, licenses, power, cooling, space, etc., but, if not planned correctly, makes the management and backup complex. Cloud computing was largely a topic for discussion in 2009 but is becoming a reality in 2010 with all the big vendors in the fray.  

A key requirement for cloud computing is cloud storage, whether it is a public cloud or a private cloud. Few have started experimenting in this area but the expectation is that in 2010, 90 percent will use private cloud and 10 percent public cloud, while some will use a mix of the two. This mix will change in future as security and data migration concerns disappear. This is the biggest IT wave in the last sixty years; bigger than the previous mainframe, mini, personal computers and network/distributed computing waves.

Solid state disk and SAS disks are causing waves in the market. Information Life Cycle (ILM) has been talked about a lot in the last six-seven years. Now, with automated tiering of data built into storage boxes to move data between solid state disk, fbre channel disks and SATA disks based on the application requirements, the cost is coming down and the service levels are improving.

Another technology which is really going to help the organisations is data deduplication. As organisations keep multiple copies of the data for long period of time, removing redundancy at the sub-block level within the fles and across servers and organisation will make for a killer app.  It brings with it real savings in terms of power consumption and cooling as it essentially means less storage to take care of. Also, advantages such as much faster replication, optimised backup environment and much better manageability. Great technology to bet on.

Other areas to watch are e-discovery, as more and more organisations have to comply with regulations and produce digital data for legal cases.As users are looking for better Return on Investments (ROI) and lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) to manage their ever growing information infrastructure, interoperability is a crucial factor, specially for heterogeneous environments. There is a lot of pressure to standardise storage technologies, just as was the case with Internet technologies in 1990s.  

There are many benefts to be gained from the development of standards, and from the purchase of products (both hardware and software) that have been built in accordance with standards. Several storage standards are emerging that will help storage administrators manage data more effciently now and in future. These are T11, iSCSI, FCIP, FCoE (Fiber Channel over Ethernet) running on CEE (Converged 10GbE Enhance Ethernet), Storage Management Initiative – Specifcation (SMI-S), T11.5 FAIS (Fabric Application Interface Standard), XAM (eXtensible Access Method).  

In future FCoE will probably make the most impact. The business benefts of FCoE include reduced cost and complexity, better and fexible performance, and reduced power consumption—all while providing seamless connectivity with existing Ethernet and storage networks.  

Some of the new technology innovations that we will see in the coming years are:

1.Using low-energy lasers to grow crystals as a storage medium in salt solutions. It has the potential to hold 100 times more data than current systems.

2.Recently, engineers in NC State University, US have created a new fngernail-size chip that can hold 1 TB (terabyte) of data – 50 times the capacity of today's best silicon-based chip technologies that use nanostructured Ni-MgO system. In real terms, it can store up to 20 HD DVDs or 250 million pages of text.

3. Next in line is Storage Class Memory (SCM).  SCM is a solid-state memory that blurs the boundaries between storage and memory by being low-cost, fast, and non-volatile.

What you are going to see in the next fve years will be drastically different from what we have seen in the last 10 years. So prepare for your 1 TB USB drive!

PK Gupta is Chairman, SNIA South Asia