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2005 storage year in review.

Article Excerpt
If information is the lifeblood of business, then preserving data is the lifeblood of storage. In 2005, stored information was subject 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 pressures, real storage costs are going through the roof.

Hardly surprising. These pressures are threatening the existence and recovery of fast-growing data volumes. Stored data used to grow at the rate of 30 to 50 percent per year, and is now reaching levels of 60 to 80 percent per year. Some industries are experiencing 100 percent growth. Storage hardware costs have fallen but storage management costs are rising sharply.

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

Backup and recovery

Backup and recovery have been with us since the beginning of the written word. Once a piece of data is recorded--be it the Code of Hammurabi, a Shakespeare folio, or critical client records--how do you protect it so it can be recovered and consulted as needed? The Code and Shakespearean folios are well protected and viewed in climate-controlled museums, but the threat of loss is imminent for electronic data.

The threat runs through all sizes of business. Enterprise and mid-market are particularly affected because of their volume of data and pressures of compliance, governance, and litigation pressures. But SMB is hardly immune--their business survival can depend on dependable and consistent backup and recovery operations.

Unstructured data is complicating the issue. Structured data volumes are growing, but the number of emails and unstructured files are exploding. Meanwhile, backup windows are shrinking to nothing while customer service demands and expectations are strong and getting stronger. All of these pressures strongly impact backup and recovery--with an emphasis on recovery. A major trend in 2005 was the growing reliance and demand on recovery. Backup doesn't go away, but the only real reason to backup is being able to get the data back again. This means being able to search more powerfully and being able to restore much faster, in response to data loss, increased regulation and legal discovery.

This means disk, since restoring individual files and email from backup tapes is extremely difficult. Tape was never meant to be a long-term searchable repository. It's good for long-term archiving, but tape is meant to make volume-level restores for events like a downed server.

NAS

Networked attached storage (NAS) is more common than ever and so is the need to manage it. Users need increasingly large capacity in their NAS structure. They're experiencing an average of 40% growth...

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