Symantecs Top Nine Storage Trends for 2010

by Chris Preimesberger

Next year, enterprise IT administrators will continue to struggle with the continuing growth of information, while budgets continue to lag. In order to keep up, storage admins will need to begin to lose their “pack rat” mentality and start deleting information. The “delete” mentality will lead to a shift from using backup as the long-term storage location. Backup will return to its intended use of protecting essential business data and IT managers will apply “recovery while archiving” procedures to manage the long-term retention and disposition of information.

Backup is the wrong application for information retention because it is organized around information islands-systems-rather than information itself. An active, deduplicated archive with automated retention and deletion reduces the cost and time of long-term information storage and retrieval. In 2010 the role of backup changes to focus on short-term recovery-fast deduplicated backups and rapid, granular recovery with built-in replication to DR sites.

Deduplication will become widely deployed as a feature, rather than a stand-alone technology. Seventy percent of enterprises still have not deployed deduplication but will take advantage of simplified deployments next year as it becomes built into most storage offerings-everything from backup software, to primary storage, to replication and archiving software.

Industry consolidation and increasing industry competition will drive the need for heterogeneous standardized management software in 2010. For example, the potential Sun/Oracle merger, as well as their competition with IBM and Cisco in the integrated x86 mainframe market, will provide a variety of choices for enterprises. These options will continue to create a need for data protection, storage, and high-availability technologies that eliminate information islands formed by mainframe-like vertical integration.

As organizations migrate to new platforms—mainly Windows 7—over the next year, they will need various storage management and data management technologies in place. However, it is important that organizations not treat these new applications in a silo manner and apply platform-level backup, deduplication, archiving, retention, and e-discovery solutions.

More users will be able to benefit from virtualization as competition increases among providers. Not only will Hyper-V provide added functionality with Windows Server 2008 R2, IBM will likely have continued support with AIX. In 2010, it will be clear that users can use all flavors of virtualization, not just x86.

As a growing number of enterprises look for ways to improve storage efficiency and reduce management complexity of their growing environments, they look to use storage architecture designs already deployed by storage service and public cloud providers. Most will begin to recognize the combination of commodity hardware infrastructure and value-added software as the best approach to deliver storage to the business but will need to decide between public, private or hybrid models.

The continued move to cloud storage over the next year will drive enterprise organizations to implement more effective data management tools and strategies. While users can use cloud computing to ensure enhanced application performance and availability, there are also inherent risks that administrators will need to address to use this flexibility.

In 2009, organizations began to shift from implementing green technologies primarily for cost-reduction purposes to a more balanced awareness of also improving the organization’s environmental standing. In 2010, these two drivers will push most enterprise organizations to implement a more wide-ranging ‘green’ strategy.