Storage Trends in 2008 and Beyond - Virtualization Issues (
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Virtualization
Issues
Despite
being much discussed, virtualization is still in its infancy, aside from server
provisioning, Dayley notes. But the strategy is gaining attention, he says.
"It's a key issue, and could affect storage more and more. With
provisioning, you could use storage on demand, which is compelling for many
companies."
Deduplication
will also be a buzzword in the future, Dayley believes. Although only 17
percent of his survey's respondents currently use data deduplication during
backup, nearly half of those polled are considering implementing the strategy
in the next year.
That
makes sense, considering how much needlessly duplicated material is being
stored on enterprise media servers, says Dayley. For example, Joe in the
accounting department might email a PowerPoint presentation to every executive
at headquarters who, in turn, email it to every department in the branch
offices. A single presentation can then become duplicated hundreds of times on
the company’s servers, and be stored as unique items. When this happens several
times a day, media servers get gunked up with unnecessary data, and it doesn't
help to ask users to perform their own housekeeping to make sure irrelevant
items are cleared from individual desktops, Dayley notes.
*Want to survive the coming storage war? Read on.
In
general, companies should think of backup as composed of a complex set of
interrelated and interdependent technologies that include a system of software,
client agents, media servers, corporate and storage networks, disk systems, and
tape systems, Balaouras says.
Because
of the complexity, it can be difficult to troubleshoot when problems occur,
particularly when backups are complete with errors, restores fail, or there are
performance problems. Added to this strain is the fact that there's more data
to back up than ever before, and it's likely that the numbers will only keep
shooting higher as data demands increase and downtime decreases.
"At some companies, storage needs are
growing by 50 percent per year," Balaouras says. "That can clash with
budget constraints, so one of the biggest trends in storage for the coming year
will be CIOs talking about their backup pain points, and creating a case for
why they need more funding for storage."
*How about some free storage and backup tools for your desktop?
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