Cloud Computing & Hosted PBX News – Dallas, TX
Cloud Computing & Hosted PBX News – Dallas, TX

Storage In The New Year

Thanks to innovations in virtualization and the cloud, the IT storage landscape has morphed wildly over the past few years. Organizations now have the power and flexibility to store data to suit not only their budgets and equipment, but also the mobility of their employees and customers. These technologies and others made great headway over the past year and should continue to transform technology in 2011, according to experts.

“The virtualization of more and more business applications and the rapid adoption of cloud technology means that storage strategies must shift from simply providing storage technology to managing storage and infrastructure as a service,” says Edward Newman, global service line lead for cloud and virtual data center infrastructure at EMC Consulting. “This will require a huge shift in storage operations for many organizations as they move their focus from simply managing storage technology to aligning with business and application stakeholders to manage the demand and capacity of their data and application services.”

Virtual Value

More than ever, organizations are turning to virtualization to do more with less—less equipment, less investment, less floor space. This concept has increasingly floated to the storage realm due to its ability to improve utilization and provide seamless data migration. Chris Marsh, IT market and partner development manager for Spectra Logic, predicts that storage virtualization and its tie-in with archival technologies will have a big impact in 2011.

“Data centers are facing requirements to reduce their budgets significantly, and the emphasis is on TCO, or annual cost, not on the capital expense side, because of the economy,” Marsh says. “Initiatives like active archiving and extending storage across multiple media types and onto tape is the most significant way to impact a company’s year-over-year cost per gigabyte of storage. Companies simply can’t get the rubber-stamp approval that they could a few years ago to purchase more and more performance disk.”

ILM To The Rescue

The amount of data stored at the average enterprise was already massive before 2010, but the rise of mobile applications and social networking has piled enterprise data even higher as more employees are working and communicating from remote locations. Still, data remains data, and most information eventually becomes obsolete, in turn placing the onus on data center managers to effectively manage the flow of information onto and off of storage systems.

Marsh predicts a rise in the use of information lifecycle management in 2011 as companies must increasingly address their approaches to storage and archiving—rather than just the products they’re using—to reduce their total cost. As data centers grow exponentially, the cost of stor-ing data is going to go directly under the budgetary microscope.

Into The Cloud

External cloud storage should continue its ascent in 2011, but internal—or private—clouds are slated to make a particularly big impact in the coming year as organizations become more familiar with the technologies and strategies around their deployment. Because businesses rarely trust their entire storage infrastructures to external cloud models, hybrid clouds that use both hosted services and on-premises archives should enjoy increased popularity in 2011.

Newman notes that many organizations are preparing for the move to the cloud by designing storage for enterprise private clouds. “The benefits to this approach include access to data from anywhere using ubiquitous Web-based tools such as REST [representational state transfer], automatic remote synchronization of updates to multiple geographic locations, automatic worldwide tiering, and compliance policy enforcement,” he says.

CDMI, or the Cloud Data Management Interface, also will have a big impact in 2011, says Rob Peglar, vice president of technology for Xiotech (www.xiotech.com), as it outlines a complete methodology for managing cloud storage via RESTful protocols and will help prevent vendor lock-in for cloud storage users.


Preparing For Change

Tomorrow’s storage technologies and strategies generally have agility and ease of use in mind, but managers can nonetheless start working now to prep their environments. According to New-man, this means preparing to go small and get dense. “If your data center is not already stuffed full of 2TB drives and straining your power and cooling capabilities today, it soon will be,” he says. “The major strategy emerging to deal with this challenge is to move toward small-form-factor drives with higher and higher densities but smaller power footprints.”

He also recommends that data center and IT managers adopt a more integrated view of their IT infrastructures to prepare for delivering IT as a service and infrastructure as a service. For example, integrated infrastructure offerings such as Vblocks could make sense for some environments. In general, he advises focusing on service levels, service catalogs, and service portfolios across the IT infrastructure to make it easier for business and application owners to understand, consume, and pay for services provided by IT.

“Data centers are also becoming more efficient in their use of power, cooling, and other ‘inputs,’ and storage strategies which leverage this trend will prevail,” Peglar says. “The overall business strategy of reducing operational expense is still very much in play in 2011, and efficient storage will win the day.”

Key Points

• Experts anticipate a rise in storage virtualization as data centers focus increasingly on TCO, rather than capital expenses.

• The coming year will breathe new life into information lifecycle management as companies look to reduce their budgets through changes to storage and archiving.

• Cloud storage will continue its rise in popularity, as will hybrid clouds and private clouds that help enterprises to ease their transition to the cloud as a whole.

Biggest Trend To Watch: Uncharted Waters

Whereas storage technology comparisons of the past boiled down to which product was the best of class, today’s IT managers now must focus progressively on the various available approaches to storage, archiving, and backup. According to Chris Marsh, IT market and partner development manager for Spectra Logic, this fresh focus will help managers determine the methodology that best meets their companies’ needs.

“Many storage companies are targeting new markets that they have not previously gone after,” Marsh says. “This translates to a merging of technologies from the mainframe, archive, broadcast, and traditional backup markets. . . . The dialogue will no longer be as granular as inline vs. post-processing [deduplication] but will expand to dedupe vs. active archive vs. cloud/outsourcing.”

Cloud vendors, in particular, are going to be challenged by other industry storage methods to clearly define and defend methodologies for data protection, he adds. Regardless of how data is compressed and moved around in the cloud, the fact remains that data is indeed in the cloud and needs to be protected and accessible. In 2011, cloud providers will be pressed to explain why they’re using a specific method for backup and archiving, rather than explaining simply that they provide those services in general.

Source

Brian