Coming to a head

Storage is a critical issue for some industries, given that their data grows 60% or more year-on-year. To the pressure for more space, add power consumption concerns, the trend towards virtualisation and the paradoxically negative effect of cheaper disk on storage management and you have an interesting year ahead.

Present at an ITWeb roundtable discussion to give their opinions on storage trends in 2008 were: Guy Kimble, information and operations director of Metrofile; Manfred Gramlich, storage practice lead at Sun Microsystems SA; Andre Froneman, pre-sales storage specialist at Quantum Africa; Malcolm Tiley, divisional manager of advanced technology services at Bytes Technology Group; Sheldon Hand, pre-sales consulting manager at Symantec; Paul de Reuck, IBM system storage brand manager for central and southern Africa; Doug Downing, enterprise brand manager at Dell; Alex Robertson, technology solutions manager at EMC; Eli Lopez, area director: Western Europe for NetApp; Richard Trickey, director of Sysdba; Marius Nicholson, managing director of Naxian; and Petrus Human, head of professional services at Attix5. This is an edited version of the discussion.

ITWeb: What will be the major trends in 2008?

Most companies don't know what's important to them.

Petrus Human, head of professional services, Attix5

Manfred Gramlich, Sun Microsystems SA: Prices are coming down, customers are buying more storage and the complexity of managing that storage is going up.

Richard Trickey, Sysdba: I think there will be a big drive in enterprises to align storage with servers. There's a big server virtualisation drive and that will drain down into storage to become more agile and flexible.

Guy Kimble, Metrofile: Until organisations take control of how they acquire and manage their storage, it will just continue growing. Until we're managing what we're storing, it will just grow exponentially.

ITWeb: What are those growth figures?

Until we're managing what we're storing, it will just grow exponentially.

Guy Kimble, information and operations director, Metrofile

Alex Robertson, EMC: In the financial industry in this country, it's 60% growth per year and the telcos are talking over 100%. They're basically saying it's out of control. So when you talk about management of information, you need to understand something about that information before you can manage it. There is a dearth of tools that will tell you what you're storing. This is definitely something you don't want to do manually. There are some tools coming that will let you classify data, and apply rules and policies to it so that you can tier it properly.

Eli Lopez, NetApp: I think we're also seeing some axioms breaking. Things like backup to tape, which we've done for the last 20 or 30 years, can no longer be done by everyone. RAID 5 has been the accomplished way of doing RAID for the last 10 to 15 years, but it's also breaking because of the size and type of modern disks. I don't think the pricing of storage solutions is dropping, although disks are.

Marius Nicholson, Naxian: We've seen a number of drivers, but compliance is a big one. Compliance is actually starting to dictate what kind of storage is being used. There are also a lot more stringent rules in place about how information should be stored and how it should be accessed. There's no doubt storage is exploding, but the rules have changed. Although storage is becoming cheaper, there's more information.

Trickey: Although there's growth, not all of it is being used. There's a lot of space that is allocated, but little is used.

Lopez: You're right; storage is growing and will, of course, never go back; compliance is a big driver too. But because of green issues, vendors are developing clever ways of reducing space requirements: de-duplication, snapshots, RAID 6 and other initiatives. We're not just selling storage any more, but a whole lot of smartness as well.

Sheldon Hand, Symantec: The flipside of storage growth is that the current utilisation is around 30%. That hasn't changed year-on-year.

Robertson: The consolidation of the server environment will drive some things in storage, but not as much as we think. The virtualisation of storage has already happened to a great extent, so it's not going to change the game all that much. With the various ways of accessing storage across different devices, you will see better tools for managing what you have, as well as better ways of moving information between those devices. But there's a little problem: a consolidation of servers creates a massive pool of storage, but you still need to address your utilisation.

Gramlich: People believe virtualisation is the cure to the problem and it's not. Virtualisation will only allow you to simplify the management of your storage infrastructure; it will not help you manage the content. Even thin provisioning will only allocate storage as and when required, but won't classify the content or help you make decisions on what to store where.

ITWeb: What are the green issues with regards to storage?

Robertson: I have many customers who say that budget for procuring is not a problem, but it's just that they cannot get more power. There is a bank in town that bought a building next to them just for the power. The building is standing empty - all the bank uses is the power feed.

Malcolm Tiley, Bytes Technology Group: We're having a lot of similar problems. Companies look for hosting space away from their premises because they cannot get power.

Gramlich: There's been a lot of discussion around tape. Is it dead? I don't think so. Tape is the ideal place to store data that you're not accessing. And there are no power issues or emissions.

Kimble: Tape is definitely not dead. We see good year-on-year growth of tape systems. The role of it is changing, though. There has been a lot of effort developing indexing and searching technologies to make accessing the stored information easier.

Nicholson: What about the 100-year storage dilemma? We have clients who need storage that lasts for 100 years. How do you guarantee that?

Robertson: There are some government departments that have 160-year requirements.

Paul De Reuck, IBM: How many of us can even read stiffy disks? If I put one here on the table, will you be able to recover the data from it? Virtualisation can at least help by moving one hardware-dependent format to another. The fact that CEOs are being held personally accountable for data makes it important that it be recoverable.

Tiley: If you ask five different people about the ECT Act, you will get five different answers, but the essence of it is that whatever laws apply to paper-based documents also apply to electronic documents. The onus is on the company to store that in a format that has the necessary legal weight when produced in a court.

ITWeb: How are vendors and customers coping with the explosion of storage?

Lopez: Every year, we come up with a new initiative that reduces the number of disks we sell. That's counter-intuitive. We're a storage company, so is that very stupid or not? We're charging customers less for disks and they're buying fewer disks and paying for the intelligence.

Robertson: Although customers are buying fewer disks, they're storing more information on them and they will soon have to look at how to manage what it is they're putting on there. And because home users are working a lot more asynchronously and generating data themselves, they expect corporates to manage that data for them.

Petrus Human, Attix5: Being a disk-based backup organisation, we find that we need to keep the amount of storage on customer sites down because they don't want to pay too much for storage. By selecting the data that's important and backing up the changes, we can do that, but most companies don't know what's important to them.

De Reuck: Because storage is so cheap, the answer to a lot of problems is to throw more storage at them. Even though the usage is only at 30%, the allocation may be at 100%. Businesses are starting to ask that they're charged for what they use. The tools are available that allow us to take a step back. If it means that we sell less storage, then so be it, as long as our customers are sustainable in the long term.

Nicholson: We don't see the 'tip of this problem iceberg' in organisations. It takes an inordinate amount of time with them to see the groundswell building up. My worry is that this is building up faster than we can cope with. I've worked with some wonderful technology from people around the table here, but I don't think that there's enough of it.

Doug Downing, Dell: Storage may be exploding at between 60% and 80%, but your IT manager does not have a budget that's exploding at that rate. In the past, when corporations were desperate to become compliant, they would throw storage at the problem. The challenge for us as vendors is to sustain good growth for our own businesses, but also give solid advice to our customers so that they can manage their growth. We mentioned tape technology earlier: who has tried to read a tape from five years ago? You can't find a tape drive to read it, so how do you stay compatible with tape?

Hand: You need a proper information life cycle management [ILM] strategy. As soon as you introduce a new technology medium, which has faster access speed and five times the capacity of the older version, there must be a process that recalls the old information and records it to the new medium.

De Reuck: And ILM is something that needs to have buy-in from the business. It's not something that can be installed from CD. It's about putting in the processes, practices and policies, and the IT guy isn't necessarily the guy who has to drive it.

Virtualisation will not help you manage the content.

Manfred Gramlich, storage practice lead, Sun Microsystems

Cheap storage is a problem for both homes and corporates. Instead of addressing what is essentially a management problem, too many users are content to simply add more storage.

The recent stories about Ozzy Osbourne and Leon Schuster losing years of work after storage failures on their home laptops may be amusing to the backup-savvy, but unless they themselves tackle the management issues, soon they could be in the same position.

Too much storage, not enough power and no proper management of content will be just as crippling as a crashed personal hard drive.