Dave Dale, vice chair, Storage Networking Industry Association,  looks at the future trends in storage

The global economic meltdown of the past two years has clearly had a severe impact on business in general and on IT in particular. 

Entering the recession, companies were completely computer-dependent, and typically balancing the requirement to manage and protect ever-increasing amounts of data, while supporting the organisation’s business agenda and driving efficiencies.  A really tough task, particularly considering that IT headcount budgets had been relatively flat or decreasing for years.

The smart strategy had been to leverage existing investments, make incremental change, and take advantage of new technologies where it made sense.  But the recession changed all that.  It was such a fast and dramatic change that most organisations realised that business as usual wouldn’t work – they had to change for the sake of survival.  Draconian cost cutting was the order of the day, and anything was on the table.  Which new suppliers and technologies should we investigate?  Do we have the right IT architecture for the next ten years?  Can we consolidate all these data centres?   Is IT a core competence for our business?  What can we outsource?

And that’s where we are today.  The good news is that recent technology advances to help.

Computing Advances
The computing environment has a direct effect on storage capabilities requirements.  In this realm, CPUs have become dramatically faster as multi-core chips have become common.  Commodity servers now deliver huge amounts of processing power, memory and I/O capability. 

This, combined with virtual server software can redefine your server environment.  Instead of having one OS and a relatively small number of applications, each physical server can run multiple OS images, each with their related applications – enabling a big reduction in the number of servers and huge cost savings.
In a virtual server environment, operating systems and applications are just data on a disk: provisioning can be as fast as a boot-from-SAN and copy from disk.  And they can be easily moved around between physical machines and between data centres.  This is a revolution in application provisioning.

At a larger scale, we are seeing redesigned data centres with many hundreds of rack-mounted or blade servers installed in hot/cold aisle configurations with “warm air” cooling for significantly reduced power consumption.  10Gb Ethernet, which is now very affordable, is the enabling network infrastructure for this.

These efficient scalable data centres, in combination with virtual server environments, provide the platform for cloud computing – the ability to deliver compute, applications or data storage as a service across geographies. This is potentially the most fundamental IT change we have seen for a couple of decades.  Storage plays an important part.

Storage Advances
Today the vast majority of enterprise storage (~75%) is networked storage.  Cloud computing will drive this percentage even higher.

61% of networked storage sold today is connected by Fibre Channel, and 39% is connected by Ethernet.  And both technologies have strong roadmaps: 8Gb FC is shipping, as is 10Gb Ethernet; and the industry is working on standards for 16Gb FC and 40/100Gb Ethernet – for completion in 2010.

From a storage protocols perspective 61% of the market is FC SAN, 13% iSCSI SAN, and 26% NAS (source: IDC worldwide networked storage systems by revenue, Q3’09). Many organisations deploy all three.
A recent advance here is Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) -- multiple vendors are already shipping solutions.  FCoE enables Fibre Channel storage traffic to be carried over 10Gb Ethernet.  In other words, your existing Fibre Channel arrays can be connected to their host computers using Ethernet.  This finally enables an evolutionary path to network consolidation in the data centre.

On the disk drive front, the biggest changes are being driven by the emergence and rapid uptake of Serial ATA (SATA) and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives. 

SATA (high capacity, low cost) drives have made it economically viable to use a disk array as a backup device.  This, combined with array-based capabilities such as Virtual Tape Library (VTL), data deduplication, snapshots and remote copy have driven disk-to-disk backup into the mainstream – delivering much faster backup/restore and significantly less downtime.  Tape is rapidly becoming an archive solution rather than an incremental backup/restore solution.

SAS now delivers similar reliability to FC drives, but higher performance, similar capacity, higher density and lower power consumption together with a much more resilient interface.  In fact most storage vendors are quietly re-architecting their back-end disk connect architecture to be based on SAS rather than FC.

This change has been rapid.  IDC estimates that SAS drives account for 50% of the enterprise hard disk drive today, with SATA at 30% and FC drives at 20%.  For 2012, they forecast 74% SAS and 25% SATA.

Another recent development has been the integration of solid state technologies into enterprise storage systems – both as a disk replacement and as a huge cache.  The benefit is very high performance and lower power consumption, and capacities are approaching disk drive capacities with ever improving price/performance.  The technology is still relatively expensive, and typically deployed to improve performance for particular applications and/or reduce the number of disk spindles required by a particular workload - but that is changing.  Eventually solid state will be pervasive in storage systems.
Storage array architectures are continually being improved to support the new server environment, and taking advantage of these technology advances with capabilities such as:
•   Multiple interconnect technologies,
•   Multiple protocols,
•   New storage media types,
•   High-density storage enclosures,
•   Improved storage provisioning efficiency,
•   Improved power efficiency,
•   Application integrated support for disk-based backup,
•   Support for the data mobility delivered by virtual server environments
•   Capacity and performance scale-out beyond the individual system
•   Data set security for cloud environments

Ask your storage vendor about how they can help you navigate this upheaval.