2008 Lights Up the Data Centre
2008 Lights Up the Data Centre
December 17, 2007: Data storage finds a new lease on life in 2008 as virtualisation moves back stage, data de-duplication prepares to step into the limelight and the rush for better storage utilisation heats ups.
So what’s really hot in the data centre in 2008? According to Hitachi, it’s the temperature. CIOs and IT managers will soon turn their attention toward technologies like storage virtualisation, dynamic provisioning and de-duplication. Basically anything that can proclaim to turn back the heat, resurrect some floor space and yank back on the data centre’s hunger for energy consumption.
From a Symantec perspective, a desire for better storage utilisation will see data de-duplication ready to take centre stage. “De-duplication has been happening for quite some time, but now it has a lot more technology wrapped around it,” says Paul Lancaster, sales director at Symantec. /p>
According to Hitachi, it’s the real business benefits of de-duplications that will hit a soft spot with IT spending decision makers. Hitachi claims the technology can deliver at least ten fold on business savings in terms of storage backups.
Symantec also lists disaster recovery, energy efficiencies and managing virtual environments to become even more relevant in 2008, with a prediction list that Lancaster says, are all equally as important and rely on each other.
“It’s all about improving storage utilisation,” says Lancaster. “It’s about having less of a storage area, requiring less power, building in energy efficiencies and having a less amount of available data from a disaster recovery perspective.
Meanwhile where virtualisation has taken off in 2007, Symantec expects organisations to now consider the future of their virtualised servers from a data recovery, security and business continuity perspective. “Server virtualisations, this time last year, was more of a test and development environment, now we’re seeing a lot more production of virtualised machines,” says Lancaster.
“Now, we’re seeing the considering for the future around how the data on those machines will be protected and recoverable from a disaster, or a virus.”
Hitachi takes the slow down of virtualisation one-step further by predicting the death of network-based virtualisation to be replaced by controller-based virtualisation as the leading approach the storage virtualisation in 2008.
On the business continuity and disaster recovery front, both Symantec and Hitachi believe the push extend on these will continue in 2008.
However Lancaster maintains that while discussions are getting more critical and indepth around disaster recovery, actual implementations have dropped off. “There is a lot of discussion going, the reason for this is that there are a lot of options out there right now,” he says. “It’s no longer about having the ability to replicate data from one site to another, there are all these cost factors that need to be considered as well.”
Hitachi is predicts disk-to-disk backup to gain even more traction in 2008, especially as organisations more to eliminate branch office tape changes and provide the means for swift restoration of data from backups. According to Symantec, backing up to tape is, “the last thing you want to do these days.”