Predictions for 2006: The storage saga continues

It's that time of the year again: The festivities are closing in, the New Year is knocking at the door, and everyone committed to public writing feels compelled to dust off the crystal ball and impart their predictions for the coming year. This time, in addition to coaxing predictions out of my magic sphere, I'm going to make suggestions about how to cope with what's coming.

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Storage security will remain a key topic in 2006, with vendors slowly adding more features to their products. As we all have read in the news, the lack of built-in security features has proven to be particularly damaging for data stored on tape media, especially when the tapes leave company premises or are lost (d'oh!).

Quantum is the first vendor to announce a comprehensive road map to strengthen security features for tape drives, libraries, and media. The new features will include hardware locks, electronic-key management, and support for SSL, native encryption, role-based access, and audit logs.

Quantum will initially focus on its latest value line tapes and on the upcoming successor to the SDLT600, but it's easy to predict that other vendors will soon be considering similar security measures for their tape devices and media.

As for suggestions for other storage segments in 2006, such as networked or host-attached arrays, I can't help feeling like a glutton in a pastry shop. There are so many interesting new products and technologies in the works that it's difficult to decide where to start.

For example, next year we could see 10 Gigabit Ethernet become more popular and push iSCSI performance higher. Clustered storage is still a very attractive segment and has some intriguing solutions in the pipeline, such as the modular Storage Brick by Terrascale. With its exabyte-size (yes, I said "exabyte" -- that's more than a million terabytes) file system based on SGI's XFS, the Storage Brick could gain popularity with companies needing top performance, virtually endless scalability, and easy management.

Also, SAS (serial attached SCSI) is finally expected to take off in 2006. I predict that SAS will take over most of the new storage shipments, but after a recent (sobering) conversation with Shaun Walsh, Dot Hill's senior director of marketing, and other storage mavens, I see the move from parallel SCSI happening in slow motion rather than at full trot. In fact, one of the latest updates from Dot Hill delivered Ultra-320 SCSI connectivity for its SANnet II box -- not quite SAS yet.

Unfortunately, SAS won't be the only promising technology moving at a slow tempo in 2006; companies both large and small have other priorities, keeping them off the cutting edge. Given a choice, for example, many storage admins, would rather choose an easy way to stay compliant with regulations than have a faster, larger, trendy gizmo.

Compliance regulations aren't a new worry for 2006, but next year will probably see more companies realizing that Uncle Sam's finger is pointing at them. For a small company, solutions such as Intradyn's ComplianceVault  should help manage the e-mail flow, but larger shops -- those counting messages by the billions -- should look at faster solutions based on cluster-blades, such as the HP RISS (Reference Information Storage System).

E-mail is not the only large, compliance-driven repository; more companies are realizing that keeping a comprehensive history of their system logs could be the only way to prove their good faith if it's called into question. For example, if you keep them long enough, system logs can be an invaluable reference to find out who accessed critical systems and when, or to prove that nobody tampered with sensitive data.

Whatever the reason, keeping those logs can consume storage by the terabyte, and making sense of that data may require ad-hoc applications, such as SenSage's suite. SenSage recently added the scalable capacity of EMC Centera to its list of supported storage devices.

How will this affect next year's storage shopping list? It's reasonable to expect the demand for storage to continue in the footsteps of 2005, with an increase in capacity of 50 percent or more. However, your next step after ordering new gear should be to introduce some serious monitoring tools. I hate to make this prediction, but it looks like managing an ever-increasing amount of storage will remain the storage admins' biggest and most expensive challenge next year. 

If your storage management apps are not delivering, push them aside and take a look at alternatives, such as Storage Horizon, a recently launched application from MonoSphere.

Storage Horizon does only storage capacity planning, but judging from a demo I saw, it does it quite well. Think of it this way: Storage Horizon is to your storage management system what an Excel spreadsheet is to your accounting system.

Then again, we could place our trust in open source technology for storage management, but IBM's efforts haven't borne much fruit: My latest search for more on Aperi came up not with storage technology as the No. 1 result, but a French organization that (pardon my poor translation) helps introduce ex-cons back into society. Hmm…

Regardless of whether you're searching for new storage solutions or tweaking the systems you've got in place, I wish you Happy Holidays, and may you and your company have a prosperous 2006.

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