2007 Roundup: Data explosion to continue

Storage companies set for a bumper 2008

2007 saw the demand for storage soar in every conceivable sector.

Hitachi shipped 1TB hard drives in the first quarter, followed by announcements later in the year that it expected to be making 4TB drives by 2011 using a new technology to help avoid problems such as magnetic avalanche.

Rival Fujitsu revealed a few months later that it would be cramming 1TB of data into a standard laptop hard drive, while Buffalo Technology came to market with what it claimed was the first external portable hard drive with a capacity of 320GB.

Storage also began to feature commonly in other devices such as mobile phones, as several new handsets packed 8GB of storage, and even TVs started shipping with hard drives built in.

The huge increase in portable media consumption saw customers flocking to the tills to purchase ever cheaper and larger memory cards, creating a market worth around $7bn.

2007 also saw the birth of commercially available solid state hard drives (SSDs) based on Flash memory rather than spinning disks.

Although still quite pricey and limited to around 32GB, the market is growing rapidly with vendors such as Alienware offering SSD as an option in new PCs and the likes of Hitachi promising 128GB SSDs around May 2008.

Manufacturers are still staking their territory in the SSD market, which is expected to do particularly well for faster and more reliable data storage in notebooks.

In fact practically unlimited levels of data storage have become so common that companies are having to find ways other than sheer volume to differentiate themselves either through green initiatives, storage density or other unique features.

Despite a security hiccup of its own, Seagate has warned that this proliferation of storage options has serious ramifications for company security.

"Today sensitive data and intellectual property can travel as email attachments, downloads from a business portal, or on a device in the user's pocket," said Ian O'Leary, corporate communications director for Seagate in EMEA.

"Data is everywhere and more vulnerable than ever. Loss or compromise of that data can be expensive and can negatively impact productivity and corporate image."

As demonstrated by some of the high profile data losses in 2007, security has to be top of the agenda in 2008. Security, surveillance and Full Disk Encryption will be some of the biggest discussion topics in the coming year.

The rise in data storage regulations, coupled with the increasing use of virtualisation, has seen enterprise storage climb dramatically as well.

But this rise has come with several warnings from pundits throughout the industry that data centres are ageing and companies are not planning ahead or demonstrating timely investment in new facilities.

Some have warned of an impending information overload as the amount of data being stored by businesses is rising exponentially, but systems to manage the information are not in place.

Some have blamed the increasing use of work email for personal banter as a primary source of data wastage, while others cite spam emails as the major culprit.

Furthermore, it seems that around two-thirds of finance houses are unable to comply with the European Markets in Financial Instruments Directive which came into effect in late 2007.

With small and medium enterprises falling under the same regulations as larger firms, but lacking the resources to make sure they are enforced, there has also been a rise in simpler storage platforms for SMEs.

Storage and power consumption at large data centres will continue to be a major focus for CIOs. Major companies like Intel and Cisco, among others, are announcing plans to consolidate or revamp data centres to make them greener and cheaper.

This trend is supported with ventures such as Hitachi's global partnership with Data Islandia to offer environmentally friendly archival data management services.

Tony Cotterill, chief executive and president of storage management developers BridgeHead Software, predicts that disaster recovery and backup are set to take the spotlight for companies in the coming year.

"There has been a clear movement over the past few years to make data highly available and rapidly recoverable to support electronic business applications as they became more key to an organisation's performance and bottom line and as disk storage prices have dropped," he said.

"But now there is real momentum building up behind archiving as the data volumes on primary storage have grown out of control.

"Organisations have started to use archiving to reduce the cost of storing data, make electronic information more accessible to the organisation, and impose IT standards for how data is managed."

This requirement is expected to drive the development of new storage technologies such as Massive Array of Idle Disks (Maid) which seems to have transitioned overnight from niche technology into one that all the large storage companies are actively pursuing.

"Maid works on the premise that not all disks in any one data centre are needed at any one time; disks that are not needed can be powered off," said Garry Veale, chief sales officer at data storage company Copan Systems.

"Maid introduces a dramatically new level of storage system energy efficiency and, coupled with the industry's highest single footprint capacity, delivers cost savings ranging from 75 per cent to 90 per cent of energy per unit of storage, and up to 10x reduction in footprint."

Storage may not be the sexiest technology, but it becoming increasingly central to every aspect of our lives, be it at home, in the office or out and about.