New storage technologies to rule the roost in 2008:Hitachi Data Systems

DQC News Bureau

Bangalore: Companies grappling with issues of cost, management and resource
allocation within their storage infrastructure can take heed. New technologies
are available to help address their issues.

According to Hu Yoshida, CTO of Hitachi Data Systems, 2008 will see the rise
of technologies like data de-duplication, thin provisioning and
services-oriented storage. The rise of these technologies is timely as most IT
organizations within companies are facing rapid data growth, shrinking IT
budgets and higher expectations.

The key technology predictions according to Hitachi Data Systems that will
impact businesses in 2008 include controlling carbon emissions through better
data center power and cooling; consolidation of IT resources through
virtualization, increased utilization of resources such as new architectures
that can scale performance, connectivity, and capacity; data mobility will
become a necessity. Among other things control unit virtualization of storage
will be recognized as the only approach to storage virtualization that can add
value to existing storage arrays; Services Oriented Storage will become a
requisite complement to Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) in the application
space and to Services Oriented Infrastructure in the infrastructure space in
order to achieve the dynamic data center of the future. There will also be
convergence of content, file, and block based storage services while thin
provisioning will provide the biggest benefit in increasing the utilization of
storage by eliminating the waste of allocated but unused storage capacity. Other
forms of deduplication like single instance store for archives, and copy on
write for snapshots will become more prevalent.