The storage market has seen an almost unprecedented era of change in the last 12 months according to industry experts. The backbone of cloud computing, storage innovation has been noticed in areas like open storage systems, primary storage de-duplication and ‘active management’ solutions as well as in large-scale, clustered network attached storage (NAS) systems.
John Shorten, technical director with Telecity Group Ireland told ComputerScope that there has been a marked increase in the use of multiprotocol switching technologies within the data centre in the last year, "particularly with clients working with large data sets", or ‘big data’ as it’s also known. "It’s now commonplace to see clients adopting switching technologies that can serve both IP and storage networks. Prior to this there were separate technologies for each," added Shorten.
Shorten also commented that one storage technology which has been of interest recently is large scale, clustered NAS systems. These are, he said, capable of striping large amounts of data across physical nodes and resolving some of the challenges posed by ‘big data’.
"The nodes are connected using InfiniBand, a switched fabric communications link that permits interconnection of devices at very high speeds. Not only is there tolerance of failure of a hard disk or component but also that of complete node failure of a particular storage segment. The increasing volume and detail of information captured, continued rise of social media and multimedia will only further fuel requirements for manageable storage of ‘big data’."
ACTIVE MANAGEMENT
Trilogy chief technology officer, Neil Stone-Wigg was a little more specific product-wise, saying that the "active management of file storage possible with IBM’s SONAS (Scale-out Network Attach Storage) and Active Cloud Engine" was a major breakthrough for those trying to get to grips with the explosion of data faced by most companies during 2011.
"It’s no longer possible to rely on manual intervention to keep the data stored in an optimum manner," he revealed, "the key service this addresses is service automation and analytics."
Other general developments that impressed Stone-Wigg over the past year ranged from "the ability to take snapshots or clone images in a highly efficient storage manner" to security in a multi-tenancy environment, and unified architecture developments which allow for "accessing and managing all storage protocols" (such as iSCSI, FC, NAS) from the one management tool.
Elsewhere, HP’s acquisition of 3PAR, and its storage array systems, has caused a stir over the past year in the storage community. Storage expert with the company, Karl Jordan was enthusiastic about its possibilities when asked about the current state of the storage market. "In virtual environments, it enables the doubling of virtual machine density of servers, resulting in a 50% reduction in physical servers required."
"All of this results in a huge reduction in the cost of ‘used‘ storage capacity, and an even higher reduction in the cost of storage administration, while delivering vastly improved agility in support of new, rapidly changing business models."
STORAGE HYPERVISOR
DataCore’s Irish regional manager Rupert Collier told ComputerScope that his attention had been grabbed by the "fast-developing concept of a storage hypervisor". Admitting that virtualisation technologies are well-established "on servers as well as applications, desktops, networks and even user profiles", Collier made the point that add that "pure play storage virtualisation is not yet as well-known".
Collier’s argument is based around the fact that companies can now enable "exactly the same benefits as have previously made companies such as VMware successful", but the context in this case is the customer’s storage hardware infrastructure.
On similar ground, IT director with Triangle, Richard O’Brien, said that virtual storage appliances (VSA) and cloud-based storage are "certainly gaining in acceptance". He continued, "The VSA concept has been around for a number of years, but has continued to gain momentum and acceptance, in particular with VMware bringing its own solution to the market recently. The ability to deliver storage area network (SAN) functionality on commodity servers with direct attached storage (DAS) makes for a compelling cost model."
Meanwhile, Evan Powell, CEO of Nexenta Systems noted how customers are focusing a lot of their interest on virtual desktop infrastructures. However, the "rapid development of the market for open storage systems has really impressed" him in the last year. "There are now significant open source based products in the market now that cut the cost basis of building out an enterprise class storage system in half. The legacy storage vendors are seriously threatened by this trend," added Powell.
PRIMARY STORAGE DE-DUP
Unified storage has been the subject of many client inquiries over the past year according to Wayne Byrne, senior solutions architect with Datapac. However, the technology that has caught his eye of late is related to tackling data storage growth. "One particular technology that has impressed has been primary storage de-duplication," he said.
"The data de-duplication process works by eliminating redundant data and ensuring that only the first unique instance of any data is actually retained. Up to now, this has been commonplace in backup and archiving solutions, which addressed the issues surrounding protecting growing data in forever shrinking backup windows. By ‘de-duping’ the primary data storage environment," he added, "the need to increase capacity as data volumes grow is vastly reduced as the redundant/common data sets are only retained once."
Asked about the rapid rate of progress in the storage sector over the last 12 months, Drobo’s CEO Tom Buiocchi felt that two developments have been particularly impressive over the past year. The first of those two developments is "the first major ‘real’ use of flash technology and the Fusion I/O IPO". This has, he said, added another level of performance and taken an innovative approach for the "performance-sensitive segment of the market".
The second development Buiocchi pinpointed is the increased availability of storage solutions designed for small or medium-sized businesses which offer ‘enterprise’ features and capabilities at an affordable price.
FUTURE
The Drobo CEO also offered an opinion on where the storage industry is headed in the coming 12 to 18 months, commenting that the pace of change is only "going to accelerate" further in that time. "We’ll see a more hybrid approach being adopted that tightly integrates public and private cloud architectures with modern on-premise storage systems. The cloud is going to have one foot on the ground for some time to come."
Nexenta’ Powell said that one of the most significant developments for the storage space over the coming 18 months is Intel’s Romley platform. "The integration of on-board SAS along with the massive increase in available PCI-E bandwidth as part of the Patsburg chipset will revolutionise the way systems are designed and put together," he claimed. The company CEO adding that this will provide "yet more benefits to storage buyers that can source hardware from the commodity hardware channel".
HP’s Jordan meanwhile focused his attention on convergence when asked about the year ahead, mentioning how the company’s converged options are based on standard x86 servers supporting both storage and server software environments. "This helps lower cost and facilitates easy scale-out to meet heavy I/O demands," he said.
There are, he added, options on the converged system market which deliver "extreme performance, agility and cost-effectiveness in a utility-based, self-service environment". All of which, he added, is "ideal for the new cloud and virtualised world".
SMALL VERSUS BIG DATA
‘Big data’ was the focus for Datapac’s Byrne, with the senior solutions architect mentioning how Gartner placed it among its "Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2012". Rather than seeing all this extra data that businesses around the world have as a burden many have, he said, "recognised that using ‘big data’ can create value".
For example, he added, "mining and analysing this data can help them make better management decisions. This data analysis, from stock inventories to sales statistics, can help expose vulnerabilities or increase productivity and hence can become the key differentiator and basis for growth."
Conversely though, Drobo’s Buiocchi argued that ‘small data’ will eclipse ‘big data’ in importance over the coming 18 months. He stated that, "Today there is big buzz around ‘big data’, but the fact of the matter is ‘big data’ is relevant to only the largest of companies and data hoarders. It’s the one person, family or business having to navigate the protection and management of their own data that affects the largest group of people-100 million individuals and small businesses nationwide alone.
"This is the more pervasive problem (when compared to ‘big data), and it highlights a persistent oversight of the entrenched, legacy storage system vendors that focus on the one per cent while under-serving the ‘little guy’." The numbers, he added, "are too big to ignore" in this regard. While ‘big data’ will continue as a top issue in 2012, it’s the ‘small data’ opportunity that will explode."
HYPE
On a similar note, Stone-Wigg claimed that storage developments "formulate and are born" at the enterprise level. "In 2012," he said, "we should look out for these innovations to quickly come down to the SME and personal (consumer) level. Because this data explosion that has been occurring at the enterprise level is now happening at the lower levels, so it’s the opportunities around servicing the 95% of businesses (SMEs) that we should watch out for."
Giving a little more detail, the Trilogy man added, "Factors around security, performance and reliability for cloud storage, coupled with the over-hyped market, will result in a hybrid approach to storage solutions, which couples tightly the cloud architectures (private and public) with the on-premise storage solutions. So the key developments to look out for are tighter and more automated ‘storage integration solutions’."
In addition, automated storage tiering was mentioned by DataCore’s Collier as a possible area of major development over the next year to 18 months. "At this stage, it would be an extremely brave IT director that puts his signature to a wholesale cloud migration, however, not all data is accessed frequently, indeed a lot of data is never accessed after creation at all," he commented.
Collier added that, "Auto-tiering works on the basis of a temperature scale so ‘hot data’, as in the data most frequently accessed, can be moved to fast disk to ensure high performance. This might typically remain on-site for that very same reason. Conversely, ‘cold data’ can be hived off to slower, less expensive disk – or, of course, the cloud.
"These days," he said, "security and data retrieval are not really the barriers to cloud computing some would have you believe, so auto-tiering your data to the cloud makes a lot of sense and streamlines organisations’ storage infrastructures very effectively. Again, one major stumbling block is hardware manufacturer compatibility, a problem solved extremely easily with a storage hypervisor."
ACTIVELY ALLOCATE STORAGE
In the opinion of Telecity’s Shorten, the short term will see further penetration of storage platforms that facilitate the rollout of virtualised workloads and cloud solutions. "Clients," Shorten contended, "want to concentrate on running their businesses without the headache of management of their burgeoning storage requirements." The ability to actively allocate storage as required "and as a commodity", is set to be further adopted in the coming period, he commented.
"The scale of storage requirements is expected to further increase," continued Shorten, "as is the overhead on the management of storage which in part is expected to be further automated in terms of encryption, logging, retention, disposal and other compliance management operations.
"The complexity of storage area networks is expected to be further reduced through the use of multiprotocol switches like the Cisco Nexus which enable storage networks and traditional IP networks to be served by the same equipment and at the required high speeds."
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