Storage keeps on chugging in 2006 10 January, 2007 By Paul Weinberg

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"Storage requirements keep going up, not just because of the needs/desire to store customer and business data for analysis and planning," stated Warren Shiau, senior associate and lead analyst in IT research at the Strategic Counsel

Capacity pressures also arise from compliance, regulatory and legal needs," he continued. "It is one of the great ironies of the electronic age that the 'paperless' office has produced and is producing documents, documentation and file proliferation that are so explosive that it simply boggles the mind."

Charles King, principal analyst with Pund-IT Review, pointed out the tendency in commercial accounts to use disc for storage rather than tape, continued to increase, with tape becoming primarily a tool for archiving.

King pointed to how in some cases backing up on tape in data laden organizations can take more than 24 hours to complete.

"Tape is obviously not going away anytime soon, it is a permanent fixture. But I think more and more tape storage or tape technology is being relegated into permanent archive. [Organizations] are moving forward to primary storage being on disc, and simply using tape [in some situations] as a necessary backup."

Linked to this is the introduction of virtual libraries which marry the advantages of tape and disc for the purposes of archiving, he continued A virtual library is a piece of software that makes a disc array act like a tape array.

"You can seamlessly incorporate cost effective disc technology into a tape environment to improve your overall storage performance without having to buy a new set of software management tools."

King also noted that storage vendors are creating new services based on storage software developed either in-house or brought on board in acquisition, as has occurred with EMC in Documentum. "Software is real agent of change for storage."

Shiau echoed a similar opinion, citing for instance storage management and search solutions for compliance and legal requirements in areas like the automatic categorization of files, documents and data for different retention categories.

"This is the area that will separate storage vendors. On the one hand, commodity resale types that have made a strategic decision to just push boxes like Dell  which can be a great way to go if you are the big volume player in the market  and the storage solution vendors that take care how enterprises manage storage and other aspects of the infrastructure. I think we will start seeing more separation of the market along these lines over the course of 2007."

The issue of whether customers continue to be befuddled by their storage options continues to ferment. Storage vendor Bocada made news during the year when it published the results of an email survey of 200 IT decision-makers in 500 enterprises that also half were complaining that storage vendors do not understand their concerns and instead foist complex, expensive and proprietary solutions on them.

A spokesperson for Sun Microsystems in Canada, Philip Kaszuba, stated that this may have happened appeared when storage vendors were pushing high cost Information Life Cycle Management solutions on corporate customers. "I don't think we did a great job as a vendor community."

But IBM brand manager in storage John Cardoulis, begged to differ. He said while he was unaware of the specifics of that survey, he believed the industry was doing a good job to simplify the storage environment and offer plenty of choice for customers.

"There are a lot of complexities within storage environments, make no mistake and we as an industry have been working very hard to develop a standard that allows all of our devices to work together, and be managed from one central point. And we made great progress in 2006, in addition to that," he added.

Tony Asaro, senior analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group, said that customer dissatisfaction was particularly strong with respect to information lifecycle management (ILM).

"Customers are definitely disappointed with the gap between the promise of ILM and the reality. The promise of ILM was to create an interrelationship between applications, data and storage to provide the right cost, performance, protection levels based on the needs of the business."

At the same time, the separation of data into different levels of priority or tiering is a valuable element of ILM, added Asaro. "[Tiering] can reduce costs significantly and improve management of storage assets. The Storage Networking Industry Association estimated that 68 per cent of all data is not accessed 90 days after its creation. If that is the case, then you need to move that data off your most expensive storage and onto lower tiers."