* New author for Storage in the Enterprise newsletter
By way of introduction, the storage newsletter has a new author. I’m Deni Connor and I’ve been covering the storage industry for Network World for the past eight years.
A lot has happened in storage during that time. We’ve seen customers move from direct-attached storage to networked iSCSI and Fibre Channel storage-area networks. We’ve seen file servers be replaced by network-attached storage. Customers have adopted less monolithic storage arrays and less expensive, but still reliable, systems based on Serial ATA technology.
The biggest news of the last eight years is the consolidation in the storage industry. We’ve seen company after company get gobbled up by larger competitors. And we’ve seen some of the largest storage companies get snatched up – think Veritas, StorageTek and Maxtor. Over the years we’ve seen start-ups like Revivio, ADIC and Pirus Networks get assimilated by companies the likes of Symantec, Quantum and Sun. We seen storage companies flounder too – think Symantec’s own attempts to assimilate the Veritas business or Sun integrating StorageTek’s tape and disk products.
The storage landscape isn’t about to change much any time soon – users will still need to find better ways to manage increasingly more storage. Start-ups will continue to be acquired and companies like EMC and Network Appliance will get larger through acquisitions. Established storage companies like IBM and HP will try to break into new markets – the small, midsize business space or the Microsoft server data protection market, for example. Some will be successful; others won’t.
New technologies such as continuous data protection will continue to thrive as customers seek to better protect their data. The area of file management will continue to expand as namespace management vendors such as Neopath start to use virtualized environments as enabling platforms to perform services such as data migration, lifecycle management and de-duplication.
Archiving for whatever reason – compliance, e-discovery or data privacy – will also thrive, as state legislatures and Congress enact new laws and users seek to comply with them. The new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure will greatly affect how nearly any business treats its data. As the newly elected Democratic Congress takes office you can expect greater attention to archiving and compliance in the healthcare and financial services industries.
Look in 2007 for technologies that rid customers of redundant files – these files account for as much as 80% of the data on the network. And look for a revival of storage service providers, especially in the data backup and protection market.
2007 is going to be an exciting year for storage – Serial Attached SCSI drives and new form factor 2.5-inch drives are going to make their way into industry standard servers. InfiniBand may become the standard for server interconnects. And 2007 will be a year for more storage IPOs and for iSCSI to go mainstream.
