Storage 2009: Success Will Depend on Efficiency

Looking ahead to the new year and economic recession, all indications are that virtualization will help the next 12 months become IT’s year of pursuing efficiency. In data storage, this means finding and utilizing as much disk capacity as possible to make best use of existing hardware and software, so that costs can be contained. For more detail, see eWEEK’s article here.Here are key trends in the data storage business in 2009 as eWEEK sees them …

Virtualized storage and any other IT product that reduces costs will be in demand. Data deduplication, thin provisioning and storage automation will get bigger and more important as more data pours into storage coffers everywhere.

Automation of virtualized resources will become more strategic to the success of enterprises. “Efficiency” is the operative term here; in its simplest form, we’re talking about the creative intersection of business intelligence, botlike software and data storage arrays.

Storage and services in the cloud will move beyond the talk and testing stage and get into regular production, most likely later in 2009. “There is a lot of interest in cloud storage in all its forms, but when you step back, it’s still the year of early adoption,” said Sajai Krishnan, founder and CEO of cloud storage provider ParaScale.

A new generation of mainframes is well-positioned to be the default “security blanket” for IT organizations. IBM’s z System mainframes—some using the Sun Microsystems open-source operating system OpenSolaris—are leading the way in that revitalized sector. They are a lot more power-efficient now.

Green IT data center strategies will continue to be deployed, spurred first by cost savings and second by environmental purpose. Business is business: While they are not willing to volunteer this information, many enterprises consider power savings and the shrinking of carbon footprints to be simply a good byproduct of efficient data centers.