Storage Reshapes for Recession

We all hope there won't be a recession. But as the months wear on with no letup in depressing news from key financial sectors, it's getting harder to see through rose-tinted shades. And storage managers, like everyone else, are preparing for lean times.

How will a macroeconomic downturn affect your shop? That depends on many factors -- not least of which is your budget. But it's likely that some technologies will come to the fore, at least near term, while others take a back seat for a while.

In this vein, market researchers Forrester and IDC have rearranged their market forecasts to reflect growth in areas they think will remain profitable despite what seems a likely slowdown in IT spending.

Using their information, as well as data from vendors and other sources, it's possible to get a feel for what may be coming down the pike.

Let's look first at what will grow:Virtualization infrastructure software. All kinds of software will continue to sell, but virtualization will head the list. No news there: It saves hardware costs and reduces the environmental impact of adding storage to the data center. Reflecting this, competition is already heating up against incumbent VMware in server virtualization. Storage virtualization is on the boil as well.

Virtualization management. Emerging hand-in-glove with virtualizing servers and storage will be management tools for those environments. A flurry of recent announcements regarding virtualization management, including ones from Akorri, NetApp, and Tek-Tools, are the tip of a growing iceberg.

Services. IT outsourcing demand will increase by 9 percent in 2008, according to Forrester. This includes a push for "software as a service," or SaaS, including email outsourcing, evidenced by Dell's $155 million purchase of MessageOne, announced today. Also growing in popularity are online backup services, typified by Carbonite's recent announcement and the anticipated unveiling of Symantec's Protection Network offering sometime soon.

Data reduction technologies. De-duplication and compression technologies save on storage hardware costs. Recent announcements from NetApp and HDS reflect ongoing interest by key suppliers.

WAN acceleration and WAFS. Companies like Cisco, Packeteer, and Riverbed are revamping their wares in light of SaaS, social networking, and entertainment applications and services.iSCSI. Lean times make lower-cost options more attractive, and iSCSI qualifies. Hence the growing emphasis on the technique by EMC, HP, Dell. This week's management announcement from Reldata showcases efforts to make iSCSI even simpler for untrained users.

So what won't grow? We'd hazard a guess that the following technologies may be put on hold in organizations where funds are tight:

FCoE. A new protocol, albeit one that's based on established specs, always faces an uphill adoption climb. Even Cisco can't change that. Unless customers see substantial savings in early deployments, it's likely they'll wait awhile on this one.

Cloud and grid computing. A new paradigm for data center connectivity and computing won't attract customers until they are in a position to spend big. That may not happen until next year.

Data center backbones. Despite strikingly odd results to a recent poll on Byte and Switch, we aren't convinced that storage customers are ready to start a full-scale adoption to vendor-specific data center fabrics, such as Cisco's Nexus or Brocade's DCX.Faster Fibre Channel. According to some sources, many Fibre Channel users are still digesting 4-Gbit/s wares. Eight-gig FC may stall until they catch up.

Data center automation. Given that data center automation of storage is still sketchy, it's likely managers will turn to better SRM tools in 2008 rather than anything fancier.

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