Like most people, I enjoy reading predictions for the coming year. Predictions related to sports, politics, and what Apple is going to announce in 2011 are all very entertaining. This is true of storage predictions as well, so when I came across this article from Dave Raffo of SearchStorage (and since I was not interviewed for my opinions or projections for 2011), I thought that I can contribute to the prognostications, at least from a storage economics perspective.
Here they are, in no significant order.
1. Price reduction of SSD, and the blending with traditional drives with sub-LUN tiering will promote further adoptions. The drives themselves continue to be cost effective, but the hybrid use will continue to increase popularity with larger sub-system designs.
2. Environmental pressures will mount for larger data centers; and in organizations with very large growth
Pressure continues on data center floor space
Metrics measuring TB per square meter, or per rack unit will be a telling tale of these limited resources
Pressure for cost effective power, power reduction and all things green will continue
3. I agree with the cloud projections made by Raffo, but I believe that the underlying storage architecture for private clouds may differ from public clouds. The seductive price points for public services will continue to stretch internal IT architects to come up with internal/local storage solutions that drive internal storage solutions to a cloud ‘cost parity’.
Continued surge of local/DAS/commodity storage architecture for some cloud architectures
There needs to be continued caution of price taking control of the conversation, without measuring the real multi-year costs
4. Reluctance to hire more storage administrators, even with improving economic climate
the trend continues to do more with less (or the same) staff
I would have thought that the hiring freezes over the last 18-36 months would finally require a catch-up phase, but what I see and observe is that automation and resourcefulness will be the mantra for the next few years
5. We are not done with reclamation, and many organizations may choose a reclamation route before specific investments in data reduction. Reclamation can be accomplished by
Archiving old data
Moving data from high-value tiers to lower tiers
White space reclaim with thin provisioning
Reserve capacity reclamation with array virtualization
I’m looking forward to tracking these issues during 2011, and writing about them as appropriate.
In the meantime, what storage economic factors do you see having an impact on your strategies and deployments this year?
By: David Merrill
Hitachi Data Systems