Contemplating IT

We have all collectively just made it through the toughest economic year and good riddance! To quote the comedian Lily Tomlin - "No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up". We certainly have enough cynicism in the IT world but at the beginning of every new year I think most of us feel a moment of optimism. So I am going to go with that for right now. Here are some things to think about for Storage and IT going forward in 2010:

- Intelligent tiered storage will be provided by a number of storage vendors. The key will be that the tiering will be at a sub-LUN level and will be based on policies. I cannot emphasis the value of intelligent tiering enough - I write about it in more detail in these two blogs here and here.

- File services will become more important as file data continues to consume more and more of our storage capacity. Included in this will be NAS and CAS solutions as well as software that manages this data. It is important that we efficiently store file data and we must make sure that all of this unstructured content becomes useful to our businesses. Right now unstructured data is pretty much synonymous with useless data. This dynamic must change - the enormous amount of unstructured content is the elephant in the data center and it is just sitting there taking up lots of space and needing to be constantly fed (I will end my analogy there so I don't offend anyone).

- Private IT clouds will be top of mind for many IT professionals. They want to leverage virtualization, management, policies and reporting to implement utility models for their IT environments. Sure, we've been talking about this for 20 years and it still hasn't really happened en masse but we now have more tools at our disposal than ever before to enable it.

- Public IT clouds will continue to be used for new web-based businesses, and lower tiers of applications and data. However, the big impact to the brick and mortar IT world is the use of applications in the cloud. The more customers use these services, the more IT infrastructure that normally would have been used in-house will not be required.

- Green IT will be more of a priority (or is this just wishful thinking on my part?). Data Centers produce 6% of green house gas emissions worldwide - more than the airline industry. It is essential that IT finally embrace Green as an initiative. And by doing so they will reduce cost and feel like they are actually doing something positive for the world. I quote the comedian Lily Tomlin once again - "I always wondered why somebody doesn't do something about that. Then I realized - I was somebody."

- More disk-to-disk backup with dedupe and less tape in the data center is inevitable. The majority of the world still uses tape as their primary backup target but the shift to disk with dedupe is well on its way and will become more pervasive in 2010.

- Automation is essential in a world that consists of PBs of storage capacity. How can you hope to efficiently manage all that infrastructure without letting smart machines make decisions for you? Yes, that is a scary thought but it is the only way to manage. That is why visibility is required for automation to work. IT professionals need the reporting tools to assure them that things are running efficiently.

- Data dedupe or rather data compression in primary storage will become a priority - if not a reality - in 2010. The problem with deduping data in primary storage is that if it is done in real-time it interjects latency. And if you want to access the data after deduping than you have to re-hydrate that data. However, with intelligent tiering - as described above - you can actually create a policy that moves unused data to a lower tier and then compress it. Intelligent tiering at the sub-LUN level enables other efficiencies - which is why it is so important to storage optimization. This solves the latency problem because it is a post process and rehydration isn't an issue because it is data that no one is accessing. And let's face it - 60-80% of your content is never accessed 90 days after its creation. That means that with 1 PB of data, 600 to 800 TB can be deduped or compressed. Even at a ratio of 2-to-1 you can lower capacity in that scenario by 300 to 400 TB. Sounds pretty good to me.

- Along those same lines, intelligent sub-LUN tiering will make SSD / EFD much more valuable to customers allowing them to have small amounts of this technology being used to maximum effect. As a result less FC drives and more SATA will be found in Enterprise-class storage.

- Cisco, Dell, HP and IBM will offer the IT world "unified" platforms. Some will be more unified than others. In the case of Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS) they don't own much of the intellectual property but instead rely on VMware and EMC for the virtualization and storage systems. Dell, HP and IBM have the storage piece in in the case of HP and IBM can also use Xen or perhaps even KVM for the virtualization. But in the end, these solutions are integration of existing technologies - some of it good; some of it mediocre and some of it crap. And the TCO will be at best pretty good and at worst unquantifiable. Coming to a town near you in 2010.

- Desktop virtualization will rise in visibility, offerings and implementation in 2010. You don't virtualize desktops for consolidation but for management and security. IT professionals can upgrade and replace these systems much more easily. If the data is stored on network storage then the company controls it and not the user. It also reduces infrastructure costs by removing capacity from each desktop.

- PC power management is becoming a big item and will be a priority in 2010. There is software out there that manages the PC power down process and saves between 30% and 50% of the electricity bill of these systems. It is kind of a no-brainer to implement especially since many power companies actually give you an incentive to implement this software.

- Server virtualization continues to thrive. Most of the customers I've spoken with this year have implemented server virtualization and there is a growing number that have a "Virtual First" policy. In other words, applications are going on virtualized servers by default and if the business unit doesn't want this they need to justify why they need a dedicated physical server.