Symantec outlines the storage trends for 2010

New Delhi: Symantec has outlined the storage trends for 2010. It has called 2010, the 'Year of Deletion'. It predicts that enterprise IT administrators will continue to struggle with the continuing growth of information, while budgets continue to lag.

The InfoPro says 2010 overall storage spending is expected to improve over 2009, but many respondents are still expecting flat or even decreasing budgets. The 'delete' mentality, Symantec assumes will lead to a shift from using backup as the long term storage location. Backup will return to its intended use and recovery, while archiving will step in to manage the long term retention and disposition of information.

Another trend outlined by Symantec is that 2010 will end the stockpiling of backup tapes for long-term retention. In 2010, the role of backup may change to focus on short-term recovery, fast de-duplicated backups and rapid, granular recovery with built-in replication to DR sites.

De-duplication will be present everywhere in the following year. In 2010, deduplication will become widely deployed as a feature, rather than a standalone technology. 70 percent of enterprises still have not deployed deduplication, but will leverage easier deployments next year, as it becomes built into most storage offerings, everything from backup software, to primary storage, to replication and archiving software. As more enterprises reap the benefits of de-duplication and the gap it bridges with information management, the primary issue will become management of storage resources. As a result, enterprises shall look to vendors to deploy simplified and cross-platform deduplication management that save time and money.

Symantec predicts that both industry consolidation and increasing industry competition will drive the need for heterogeneous standardized management software in 2010. These options will continue to create a need for data protection, storage, and high availability technologies that eliminate information islands formed by mainframe like vertical integration.

2010 is also predicted to be a year of migration. Symantec suggested, as organizations migrate to new Microsoft platforms over the next year, they will need various storage management and data management technologies in place. As organizations migrate, they are likely to make technology improvements across the board to provide improved protection and management that will support all Microsoft applications in the most efficient way. However, it is important that organizations not treat these new applications in a silo manner and apply platform level backup, deduplication, archiving, retention, and e-discovery solutions. A trusted platform can address both new and old applications in a centralized way.

Virtualization is expected to move beyond x86. In 2010, more users will be able to benefit from virtualization as competition increases among providers. As virtualization becomes even more widespread and prolific, users will need to implement strategies and technologies that help them to manage the entire IT infrastructure, whether physical or virtual in a robust, yet simplified and user-friendly way.

Symantec further suggests that as a growing number of enterprises look for ways to improve storage efficiency and reduce management complexity of their growing environments, they look to leverage storage architecture designs already deployed by storage service and public cloud providers. Most would begin to recognize the combination of commodity hardware infrastructure and value-added software as the best approach to deliver storage to the business, but will need to decide between public, private or hybrid models. In evaluating their options, enterprise storage managers must consider the cost, scalability, availability, manageability and performance of any solution that will serve as the foundation for file-based storage services.

The continued move to cloud storage over the next year may drive enterprise organizations to implement more effective data management tools and strategies. While users can leverage cloud computing to ensure enhanced application performance and availability, there are also inherent risks that administrators will need to address to leverage this flexibility.

Another trend outlined for 2010 was that organizations can no longer procrastinate 'Going Green'. In 2009, organizations began to shift from implementing “green” technologies primarily for cost reduction purposes, to a more balanced awareness of also improving the organization's environmental standing. In 2010, these two drivers will push most enterprise organizations to implement a 'green' strategy. IT decision makers are increasingly justifying green IT solutions by more than cost and IT efficiency benefits. They are now looking to a number of factors such as reducing electricity consumption, cooling costs and corporate pressure to be 'green.'