Symantec has come forward with its predictions for storage over the next 12 months, and it has nominated 21010 as the ‘Year of Deletion’.

According to the company, next year, enterprise IT administrators will continue to struggle with the continuing growth of information, while budgets continue to lag.

In order to keep up, storage admins will need to begin to lose their ‘pack rat’ mentality and start deleting information. The ‘delete’ mentality 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 prediction is that In 2010 the role of backup changes to focus on short-term recovery – fast deduplicated backups and rapid, granular recovery with built-in replication to DR sites.

"In 2010, deduplication will become widely deployed as a feature, rather than a standalone technology. Seventy 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 deduplication and the gap it bridges with information management, the primary issue will become management of storage resources. As a result, enterprises will look to vendors to deploy simplified and cross-platform deduplication management that save time and money."

Both industry consolidation and increasing industry competition will drive the need for heterogeneous standardised management software in 2010, according to Symantec.

For example, the potential Sun/Oracle merger, as well as their competition with IBM and Cisco in the integrated x86 mainframe market, will provide a variety of choices for enterprises. 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.

"As organisations migrate to new Microsoft platforms over the next year, they will need various storage management and data management technologies in place. While upgrading is not always a priority for IT organizations, given tight budgets and the resources needed to manage the process, newer versions can offer significant technological advancements and performance enhancements that can help organizations better meet their SLAs.

"As organizations migrate, they will likely 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."

Symantec also predicts that 2010 will see the flowering of many varieties of virtualisation, the growth of cloud storage and widespread greeniness.