Turning the idea of tiered storage into a usable reality for IT managers will be an important goal for storage producers in the next two years, says the International Data Corporation (IDC).
This observation comes in the context of enterprises needing to store a greater amount of different types of information for longer periods to comply with various corporate governance guidelines.
A recent IDC white paper on storage says a networked storage controller (NSC) is the newest and potentially market-changing solution for meeting the current and future requirements of the enterprise market.
"The use of NSCs will make it possible to extend many of the capabilities of intelligent controllers to multiple, attached storage systems without sacrificing performance or reliability," says Richard Villars, author of the IDC white paper.
The document says NSCs have the potential to deliver the required support for different storage systems, common data replication tools, virtualisation and logical partitioning.
Of these, Gartner identifies virtualisation as an increasingly important component because of its potential for enhancing security and flexibility.
"On the hype cycle for storage technologies, we believe virtualisation is still approaching the peak of inflated expectations," says Josh Krischer, Gartner's European VP and research director of enterprise servers and storage.
Krischer says the benefits of virtualisation include optimised performance, cost and availability, and eliminated boundaries. "The higher value for virtualisation will be for customers using heterogeneous storage," he adds.
"Virtualisation is going to help when there are huge numbers of applications in different business units that want their own infrastructure to avoid performance degradation through sharing resources," says Fanie van Rensburg, MD of local Hitachi distributor, Shoden Data Systems.
Hitachi is one of the first companies to deliver an NSC-based solution and introduced control unit (CU) virtualisation to the enterprise market with the launch of its TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform in September 2004.
Krischer says Gartner received positive response to CU virtualisation at a recent storage convention, with 89% of attendees saying they were interested in exploring CU virtualisation and partitioning.
"The majority of attendees (65%) also indicated support for Hitachi's approach of putting virtualisation in the storage control unit as opposed to external appliances or the network," says Krischer.
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