Oversights in Hindsight

Was it Dickens or Emeril who said that sauce for the goose was also sauce for the gander? No matter. We like to dish it out here at Byte and Switch, but we like to think we can take it too. Check out our message boards if you think we dont get a little self-effacing from time to time.

So when we recently dusted off a series of predictions we made about this time last year, we found that our batting average -- even at .500, which ain't bad for baseball -- was pretty crummy if we entertained any notion of moonlighting on the Psychic Friends Network. (See 2005: The B&S Report Card.)

But our annual report card doesn’t tell the whole story. Sad to say, we missed a few technologies or market dynamics that we couldn’t have foreseen 12 months ago when we gazed deeply into the crystal LUN.

We haven’t exactly ignored security, but we must confess we were taken aback at just how big a deal it became over the course of the year. This was fueled in large part by a series of damning and damaging headlines about data losses that ran the gamut from spotty courier services to outright negligence. (See Financial Security: Priceless, Don't Be a Data Privacy Dunce, and IT Managers Sweat Security.) It seemed like every backup vendor out there wasted little time piling on Iron Mountain, and forgetting a central tenet of marketing karma: There but for the grace of god go thee and thee and thee.

Safe to say that encryption and other measures to protect data at rest will continue to proliferate in the next several months, but with any luck, backup tapes and maxed-out hard drives will stop disappearing into thin air.There were other backup breakthroughs that our magic storage 8-ball failed to divulge. While it already had momentum going into 2005, continuous data protection (CDP) really caught fire as IBM and Microsoft got into the game, dragging a reluctant EMC along. (See IBM Hops CDP Bus, Microsoft and Symantec Cut SMB Tape and EMC Pulls Forward With Backup.)

WAN backups were also big news on CDP’s heels, with vendors like Availl, Brocade, and Cisco pushing wide area file services (WAFS). (See Availl Touts WAFS System, Brocade Busts an IT Move, and Cisco Chomps FineGround.) Cheap, high-capacity Serial ATA (SATA) disks fueled this trendb -- and it shows no signs of slowing.

While it's not the most scientific measure out there, WAFS also had the dubious distinction of being the most widely searched phrase or acronym on B&S in 2005. Take that, EMC, HDS, HP, and IBM.

In just a few short days, we'll all have a tabula rasa in the form of 2006. From everyone here at Byte and Switch, here's to a healthy, propserous new year for you and yours.

— Terry Sweeney, Editor in Chief, Byte and Switch