Storage Trends Emerge as Fall Shows Get Underway

Everyone's getting smarter about green IT -- really. While it's easy to be skeptical of hype about energy-efficient data centers, there's apparently enormous effort going into making them happen. "People are getting over the greenwash stage," says analyst Greg Schulz of the StorageIO Group. They're just starting to explore ways of streamlining power, cooling, and floor space for what he calls intelligent storage management. Thing is, any really solid energy plan will be multifaceted, involving a number of steps taken to reduce consumption. There isn't a silver bullet. "If thin provisioning is just divvying up utilization, it's just masking the problem," Schulz says.

Other options for saving power include MAID as well as the HDS method unveiled this week for coordinating disk spinning in arrays. Also in play is any technology that facilitates equipment consolidation, such as de-duplication and virtualization.

Security is joining the SAN. It's no news that storage managers are preoccupied with security. But many are looking at solutions that blend into the SAN fabric itself, instead of using detached boxes a la NeoScale or NetApp's Decru. "More people are securing storage, particularly in regulated industries like financial and government," says Greg Farris, director of marketing at CipherMax, the company that emerged from MaXXan earlier this year.

Farris is biased, since CipherMax competes against NeoScale and Decru on the basis of size. He says organizations that don't want to stack up multiple appliances can map the SAN and then add security policies to it with CipherMax's technology, which emerged from MaXXan's work on a large storage switch. The vendor's software provides tape and disk encryption and advanced key management, and it performs key rotation, an increasingly popular form of protecting data by issuing a new encryption key for overwritten tapes.

But fabric storage appears to be more than a CipherMax pitch. Emulex this week unveiled authentication features for its HBAs, which will bring security into 4-Gbit/s and "forthcoming" 8-Gbit/s HBAs. Stay tuned.

File systems are scaling. Here's a prediction: 2008 will be the year of the gargantuan NAS. Enterprises are glomming onto the concept of shared file systems that link to modular storage. Examples include "grid storage" announcements from NEC and Parascale, as well as enhanced NAS gateways from ONStor and SGI. Expect more from this quarter in the weeks ahead.

De-duplication will be a partners' game. It's tough to create de-duplication, but users are keen to have it. What's more, there's growing evidence that there's no one way to do it right. Therefore, storage suppliers who can't afford to acquire the technology or develop it themselves are going to seek partners. Pillar's choice to certify de-dupe vendors and resell others, unveiled this week, appears to be just the first of a series.

"We will add de-dupe, yes. We're getting ready to announce certifications with a number of different companies," says ONStor CEO Bob Miller. "We are not doing it ourselves."

SRM is gaining new ground. It's no surprise to see fresh focus on tools that enable storage managers to get better control of increasingly important assets. Monosphere, for instance, is extending its capacity management software to work with HDS arrays. Monosphere tracks and forecasts the disk usage of specific applications. Up to now, the vendor has supported EMC systems and NetApp filers. According to VP of marketing Frank Kettenstock, compatibility with HP and IBM arrays is coming "soon."

Other vendors have similar tools, including Akorri, AppIQ, and Symantec. And there's no slowdown in management applications for other aspects of storage. (See Backup Reporting Tools Become DPM.) Before the end of the year, we expect to see further activity in this space.

CipherMax Inc.

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS)

NEC Corp. (Nasdaq: NIPNY; Tokyo: 6701)

NeoScale Systems Inc.

Network Appliance Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP)

ONStor Inc.

Pillar Data Systems Inc.

SGI

The StorageIO Group0