Top five storage trends

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Dale was a tad vague giving a time frame for the adoption, but Jamon Bowen, director of sales engineering and customer support at Texas Memory Systems, was much happier to put his chips down.

“My projection is that if the historical price curve stays the same it will be two-and-a-half years until [SSD] levels [with disk],” he said.

“The change within two-and-a-half years will not be everything, but within 10 years I think we will see everything going to SSD.”

Deduplication

A surprisingly debated entry into the top trends to look out for, deduplication seemed to split the industry as to whether it was the right back up technology to be used.

Less of a surprise was Data Domain’s opinion. Trevor Cooper, business development consultant for the company, discussed the company’s latest releases, all with built in deduplication, and was almost evangelical about its importance.

But NetApp’s Dale took a dig at the company and its new owner.

“We think they [EMC] paid too much, we weren't going to pay that,” said Dale. “We knew what it was worth and we weren't going to be dragged into paying more. We are glad we didn't try to match the price as economically it was not viable.”

The technology clearly has its key evangilists. That said, many vendors left the technology behind choosing different methods to ensure backup, with many sticking to providing tape solutions.

Deduplication will be another interesting technology to watch to see if it lives up to the hype.

Archiving

The final technology to keep an eye on is archiving. It dominated discussion at both conferences, with key players entering the space with new products.

BakBone made a splash with its new NetVault Archive solution. It tackled the archiving problems for large companies who tend to end up with several pools of data rather than a central location that can then become useful for company data analysis.

“Customers say they want to create a repository," said Andrew Brewerton, BakBone's technical director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). "Rather than just lifting [data] off and storing it on tape for seven years, actually what we are building up here is a business asset.”

Another big player happy to put its faith into archiving was Hitachi Data Systems as both in a meeting with IT PRO and during a panel discussion at Storage Expo, its chief technology officer Huw Yoshida claimed archiving was the place to invest.

Only time will tell just how many other vendors will jump onto the archiving bandwagon following its positive reception at both of these events.

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