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The data storage industry continues to develop better, faster, larger capacity hardware to archive critical digital data. Experts expect the trend to keep doubling storage capacity every 18 months or so. Meanwhile, software developers chase close behind with innovations designed to manage the ever-growing volumes of back-up data.
Yankee Group analyst Sal Capizzi does not doubt that data storage capacities will continue to increase. The real change in the industry, he believes, will focus on the concept of ubiquitous access, particularly for mobile users.

Increased capacities are nothing new, noted Capizzi. "The amount of data stored has been exploding for years, and there are no signs that this will let up anytime soon," he told NewsFactor. At the same time, he said, the data storage industry is rapidly moving to a model where users will have the ability to connect to a network and access data anytime regardless of the time or their location.

So what can enterprise users and consumers expect to be doing in the next five years to access their stored digital archives in our data-addicted digital society? To be sure, enterprise users will get first dibs on some innovative storage technology now in the works. But consumers will continue to see advancements in existing storage models.

In this special report, NewsFactor takes a look at the road ahead for data storage. We found that you can plan on replacing your current hard drives with much larger devices for primary storage and backup within the next year or two. Some storage experts suggest that inexpensive replacements for existing data tape backup systems will not be developed in the near future, leaving an external disk storage device as the only viable option.

Vitualizing Data

Abbott Schindler, senior technologist for the storageworks division at HP , agrees with the popular notion that the data storage industry is at an important juncture that will likely take several years to sort out. "It is evolving from an historical hardware infrastructure focus towards a management and application software focus," he said. The result will be the movement of today's advanced functionality to lower-end storage systems.

The watch word in new storage technology is virtualization. Storage virtualization is the combining of multiple network storage devices into what appears to be a single storage unit.
Within the next five years, all data storage will become virtual," insisted Greg Herzog, storage engineer for Optimus Solutions. "We will get to the point where disk arrays and other storage devices will not be tied to only one physical container."

Instead of placing data on one dedicated device attached to a local computer, new storage devices will route data to the appropriate class of storage. Once all data storage is virtualized, management systems will apply policies that will regulate how and where each part of the data is stored. This, said Herzog, will provide users with faster and better data access.

"The goal will be to virtually move all data throughout the backend seamlessly," said Herzog. "The challenge will be for the manufacturer who can take all the pieces and get it done."

Data Storage Trends

Although Fiber Channel disk drives will still be dominant in the data center, in the next year Capizzi sees an increase in the use of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) disk drives. While these drives do not have the performance of Fiber Channel drives, they are more cost effective for retaining large amounts of data that is not accessed very often, he said. The use of these drives will continue to be standard in disk-based backup solutions such as Virtual Tape Library appliances, said Capizzi.

Capizzi said the next few years will see an up tick in the use of technologies that allow the end user to quickly access data. The objective is to make the data appear to be local to the user, even though it could reside hundreds or thousands of miles away. To that end, he envisions the use of storage that takes advantage of iSCSI drives, Ethernet, and IP-based storage deployments.

As part of this data access improvement, de-duplication technologies will become an integral part of the data backup process, said Capizzi. With the data explosion, businesses cannot afford to backup the same data more than once. Data de-duplication will ensure that data is backed up only once.

Authorization, authentication , and encryption will be a standard part of a data-handling innovation known as the Information Lifecycle Management, or ILM, process.

Schindler, HP's data storage expert, concurs, noting that Information Lifecycle Management will mature significantly. "At least some of the functionality that's available today only in layered software will migrate into storage systems, and possibly into business applications themselves."
New Drive Innovations

From a technology perspective, Bill Healy, senior vice president for corporate strategy and marketing at Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, sees the path over the next year clearly aimed at increased capacity at lower cost. With the introduction of perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) into products being shipped this year, there is great optimism for hard disk drives as the prevailing storage technology leader in cost per megabyte.

"Over the next year we see PMR becoming the predominant recording technology for hard disk drives, quickly overtaking current longitudinal recording by the end of 2007," said Healy.

According to Optimus Solution's Herzog, ATA hard drives capable of storing 1 terabyte of data will be commercially available within one year. He said at least one hard drive manufacturer is now working on the release of a 750GB drive.

Herzog also expects the industry to improve the current 20 percent duty cycle of hard drives within one year. All SAT-style hard drives suffer from one common design flaw-- a burnout from constant motion. As the problem of disk drive failure is solved, he expects to see SATA hard drives become common place in enterprise servers as a cheaper alternative to the more-costly SCSI drives.

Hard drive makers will boost performance with the addition of large scale nonvolatile memory caches, said Herzog. "We will see 4, 6, or 8GB caches to improve the performance of very large capacity hard drives."

The cost for these new hard drives will be too steep for consumers at first, noted Herzog. I.T. departments will start to use 1TB hard drives until the 2TB drives come out. Then the 1TB drives will find their way to consumer-class equipment, he said.

But consumers will not have to wait more than one year to get their hands on laptop computers with 8- or 10GB hard drives. Another alternative soon to be available, according to Herzog, will be operating systems imbedded in the circuitry without an installed hard drive. Data will be stored on newer versions of today's external flash drives.

Smarter Storage Hardware

HP's Schindler said there are several interesting things happening now that could reshape the industry over a five-year time span. Maturing grid computing models and growing commercial deployments of grids could become driving forces. So could changing data access models such as blade computing. Another driving factor will surely be the increasing regulatory impact on data-related processes and policies.
Schindler anticipates more sophisticated data access models that accommodate both new data formats and more flexible data access. "Storage systems will continue to evolve mostly along their historical paths, but we'll see tighter integration between hardware, management software, and perhaps business applications," he said.

Another major hardware breakthrough could come in areal density that demonstrates the hard drive's resilience, with strong product road maps well into the next decade. Hitachi's Healy expects to see major breakthroughs in storage capacity continuing to double every two years with work on extensions of perpendicular recording, like patterned media, beginning to take shape.

According to Healy, more reliable and secure hard drive technology will be developed that is also more power efficient, more rugged, more tailored for CE devices. "We'll see a proliferation of the numbers and types of applications that will use hard drives -- especially in consumer electronics," predicted Healy.

Tape or Disk?

New storage technologies will enter the market, challenging the front runner tape and hard drive media. Storage experts agree that the success of new adoptions will vary with applications that use them. Clearly, no one storage technology can possibly meet all storage application requirements, according to a new IDC special report. Despite challenges from competing storage technologies, technology consulting firm IDC predicts that hard disk drives (HDDs) will continue to lead in density and price through 2015.

"Reports of the HDD's demise have been greatly exaggerated," said John Rydning, IDC's research manager for Hard Disk Drives and Components in an industry report. "Mapping out technology and usage road maps through 2015 reveals clear strengths for some storage technologies and potential battlegrounds between others," he said.

According to Yankee Group's Capizzi, continuous data protection will accelerate the use of hard drive storage as a first-tier target. While tape devices will always be more frequently used for data archiving functions, hard drives will become the preferred method as the first level of multiple backup systems. Restoring data or files from disk is much easier and more reliable than tape, he said.

From Capizzi's view, even though tape will be around forever, in five years he sees optical, portable disk drives used for archiving. The prices of these products are higher than tape, and the densities are not as high. "But over time this will improve and many companies, particularly smaller ones, will opt for archiving to disk rather than tape," he concluded.
HP's Schindler agrees, adding that data protection will continue to evolve away from tape-reliant technologies and more toward disk-based technologies. "Tape will continue to play an important role, but what we've seen over the last year -- greater use of disk for protection against short-term data loss -- will grow," he said.

Cost Not a Concern

Forrester's data storage analyst, Roger Cox, is sure that storage costs will remain consistent with today's prices as newer technologies find their way into the enterprise space. "Bigger, better, faster storage will replace earlier capacities for about the same gibabyte per dollar," he said.

In fact, the trend is to continue buying more capacity for a dropping dollar-per-gigabyte cost, confirmed Wayne Adams, chairman of the Storage Networking Industry Association board of directors.

"Everything is following that trend for larger capacity at lower cost," he said. "It's all about finding cheaper ways of increasing density and tweaking physical surfaces."

A key factor in this price stabilization is the declining price of storage components, according to Josh Howard, data storage specialist for CDW. "The industry is keyed to more bang for the same buck," he said. Corporate storage budgets will remain the same for technology acquisition because the data storage industry will continue to expand its offerings and services within existing price points.

However, HP's Schindler sees the financial picture a bit differently. He believes the data storage industry will continue to shift the cost of storage from hardware to software. The total cost of ownership will very likely continue to drop, he said.

Hitachi's Healy agrees with other experts who predict the cost of storing data will drop as technology rises. Hard drive cost per megabyte will continue to go down, he said.

"Today, a gigabyte of storage could cost as little as 50 cents. We see this trend continuing, although probably not at the same rate. We see the hard drive continuing its leadership in offering the lowest cost per megabyte over competitive forms of storage for the foreseeable future," concluded Healy.

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