2010 Predictions

Published by Wayne Salpietro | Filed under Wayne Salpietro, Director PMM

Every New Year brings with it hope for a more prosperous year than the one before and a clearing of the previous year’s frustrations. We all enter New Years Eve with a sense of optimism and it’s a good time to look at the horizon and predict what we think the next be 12 months will look like.

Having waited a few weeks; I have tempered my unbridled optimism while looking ahead to the end of the year 2010. From a technology perspective, I continue to be optimistic, which in sharp contrast to what my views were for 2009. Last year was an incredibly difficult and frustrating year for everyone. The economy tanked and IT spending was off so markedly that some businesses, simply stopped spending on IT altogether. In most cases the IT spend was on an as needed basis and in all cases “if it doesn’t have a quick ROI” the money was just not available. At this point we seem to be past the worst of it and there are many signs that validate that opinion.

The business dynamics of the last year enabled a “New Normal” to evolve that required optimization of existing investments, tight budget controls and a “flight to efficiency” that we haven’t seen in IT for many years! These behaviors seem to have taken hold and will be the model for 2010 and beyond. Luckily, the technology industry advances are helping with lower cost storage as density increases and the cost per GB continues down a curve. Many of these advances have been from companies that did not stop investing in R&D and did not fall to the economic cycle of 2008/9. The investments were made by smaller more agile technology companies that are driving the trend back to a more prosperous business climate.

The years 2008/2009 saw rapid expansion and adoption of some key technologies such as deduplication, virtualization and cloud. Each has been fodder for the industry analyst communities and the technology press that have called each a new frontier and the savior of the IT budget! In fact, each is helpful and each has been impactful. However, they are at the early stages of their lifecycle and broad adoption is still in the future. Albeit near future in some cases!

Deduplication has been deployed in the backup space for the last few years and has risen to become a “must have technology.” It can save space, costs of storage and improve efficiency in the backup cycle! OK good first use case! But what about the rest of the information businesses manage? Primary storage, where the most active and important business information is stored must have duplicates? Or, how about tier 2, beyond storage, and archive storage? These all have duplicates! In 2010, use of deduplication will extend to all of these. The most difficult will certainly be primary storage where deduplication must be “non impactful” in the overall ingestion and rehydration of information. Technical advances from those smaller vendors I mentioned earlier will enable this to happen and broad adoption including primary, tier2 –n and archive will begin to occur in 2010!

Virtualization has also taken hold of the IT imagination and the seamless and transparent access that it employs has improved the efficiency of information management, user deployment and information complexity. The key enabler has been the ability to rapidly deploy virtual machines. One caveat in this panacea is the virtual machine images themselves. The backup/compliance/gold master copies of the images. They consume huge amounts of storage and for the most part are 90% the same. What a great opportunity for deduplication! As deduplication use cases expand in 2010 the bloat seen from VM images will be tamed!

Cloud computing and more specifically cloud storage seemed to be rapidly rising as an alternative model. The ability to shift CAPEX to OPEX during the economic cycle of 2009 was appealing to the finance managers who held the purse strings of many IT managers. However, historical awareness of the initial attempts of “storage as a service” several years ago quickly brought down to earth the reality of data security and public storage! In recent discussions with industry analysts and CIO surveys, the fear of security issues has quickly slowed the fervor on cloud deployments in many enterprises. 2010 will see the small steps forward in cloud computing that will deploy “private clouds” that will be within the corporate firewall but provide shared deployments enabled by multi-tenancy support. This will enable a better utilization of resources and optimize information management and CAPEX. In some cases, smaller businesses may utilize public cloud deployments as a necessity continuing to be driven by the economics they provide.

One necessary technology that I believe will quickly evolve is new data protection solutions for larger capacity drives. RAID is “running out of gas”! As we continue to see larger and larger data stores many in the 100’s of TB and even reaching petabytes. These data stores are utilizing the latest and largest drives available, 1 TB and 2 TB. As the scale grows, it is increasingly risky to depend on RAID technology that was initially developed in the 1980s! Back then a petabyte may have been mathematically possible but was not included in the design of RAID. Today petabyte data stores are reality and increasingly more probable as we continue to store and retain more information daily. The key issue is at the petabyte scale, using 1 and 2 TB drive technology; RAID cannot recover effectively and efficiently and without data loss or corruption if there is a failure. Newer more scaleable technologies using erasure coding techniques can scale and provide the recovery and data protection necessary in the petabyte scale data stores we will see more frequently in 2010 and beyond.

2010 will be an interesting year and I am optimistic that we will see the advances mentioned above take hold and deliver increased value and cost/efficiency to IT and a more robust economy. Let’s not forget what we have endured and let’s apply what we have learned to optimize our business and our information!