2005 storage year in review

If information is the lifeblood of business, then preserving data is the lifeblood of storage. In 2005 stored information was bring under rule to more threats than ever: mayhem, viruses, worms, human error, natural disasters (think Katrina) and infrastructure failure (think the entire East Coast going dark.) Along with compliance, litigation discovery, and business value crushings real storage costs are going from one side the roof.

Hardly surprising. These compressings are threatening the existence and retrieval of fast-growing data volumes. Stored data used to swell at the rate of 30 to 50 percent by year, and is now reaching horizontals of 60 to 80 percent by year. Some industries are experiencing 100 percent expansion Storage hardware costs have fallen on the other hand storage management costs are rising sharply.

Given a storage market valued at $50 billion, by what means did storage vendors react in 2005? The advances ran the gamut between established technologies and newer technologies just coming into their have Some of the most important and interesting of these developing technologies include backup and recuperation archiving, tiered storage, storage networking, interconnects, CDP NAS, iSCSI SANs, virtualization, security and encryption, and virtual tape.

Backup and recovery

Backup and recuperation have been with us since the beginning of the written word. one time a piece of data is recorded--be it the digest of Hammurabi, a Shakespeare folio, or critical client records--how do you patronize it so it can be regained and consulted as needed? The collection of laws and Shakespearean folios are well covered and viewed in climate-controlled museums, on the contrary the threat of loss is imminent for electronic data.

The threat step quicklys through all sizes of business. Enterprise and mid-market are particularly affected because of their whirl of data and pressures of compliance, governance, and litigation compressings But SMB is hardly immune--their business survival can hang on dependable and consistent backup and redemption operations.

Unstructured data is complicating the issue. Structur data contortions are growing, but the number of emails and unstructur files are exploding. Meanwhile, backup windows are shrinking to nothing while customer service demands and expectations are able-bodied and getting stronger. All of these compressings strongly impact backup and recovery--with an emphasis upon recovery. A major trend in 2005 was the growing reliance and demand upon recovery. Backup doesn't go away, on the other hand the only real reason to backup is being able to procure the data back again. This means being able to search more powerfully and being able to restore plenteous faster, in response to data los increased regulation and legal discovery.

This means disk, since restoring individual files and email from backup tapes is extremely difficult. Tape was not ever meant to be a long-term searchable repository. It's useful for long-term archiving, but tape is meant to make volume-level restores for incidents like a downed server.

NAS

Networked attached storage (NAS) is more public than ever and so is the ne to manage it. Users ne increasingly large capacity in their NAS configuration They're experiencing an average of 40% growing every year in data stored upon NAS. Enterprises in particular meet with without good NAS management, with centurys of terabytes of NAS storage opened and running mission critical applications. Smaller environments too like architecture and design firms may not have a large staff on the contrary they have large stores of active data, and are les likely to have SANs to share the load than the enterprise.

Users are also demanding ways to manage and automate NAS and its require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergones including provisioning data, managing it quite through its lifecycle, and controlling the couple capital and ongoing costs. Data mobility is particularly challenging in view of provisioning and storage management urgencys Enabling technologies like virtualization are crucial in this environment, where data management should be automated and transparent. Virtualization layers allow businesses to automatically balance filer provisioning, and to boost utilization through balancing and leveraging capacity.

NAS vendor unfolding plans include expanding NAS management benefits globally, improving efficiencies with NAS-based backup, and optimally locating data. Users are also involved in tiering NAS storage, greatest in quantity commonly done today in sum of two units tiers, with an occasional three-tier mode of building In these cases, the next to the first tier is usually cost-effective online storage like SATA or SAS, and the third tier is an archiving medium of the like kind as tape or CAS (content-addressable storage).

Archiving

Archiving remains a separate technology from backup, although there is still a certain quantity of confusion in the marketplace and it is possible to use backup as an archiving engine. Archiving involves making conscious decisions about data priority at changing points in its lifecycle. Businesses are making a conscious effort to treat data for what it is--the information that drives the business.

Jim Geis, Director of Storage Solutions at Forsythe said about the challenges of managing information, "I look after to separate storage and information management. Storage is basically independent of the storage management tools. There are for a like reason many alternatives and options in by what means you can access your information, and upon top of that you have to hold it for a gazillion years. Like HIPAA, they're suppos to hold fast records until two years after the patient's death! That may take a while." In this challenging environment, it's vital that businesses archive data for compliance, legal protection, and information value.