"It Gets Down To How Fast You Can Access Tape".

Interview with Aberdeen Group's Dave Hill

David Hill, research director of Storage and Storage management at Aberdeen Group has been watching the storage business for a long time, boasting 30 years of experience in IT with a strong emphasis on storage management; decision support systems, and internal IT management. His current focus is on new storage technologies, including such topics as NAS and SAN, plus tape, disk, storage management, and storage-related professional services.

DAVID: What is changing, at the higher levels at least, is that we've got to learn how to manage these things. Now we have management issues anywhere from desktop on up. If I have a 20GB drive and decide I want to store MP3 files on it, it doesn't seem too serious to lose it (if the drive fails), but I may lose the days and weeks I spent to record (the MP3 files). It's the time I don't want to lose.

In the enterprise, we have to figure out to manage all the data. With the Internet, everything is 24x7 and there's no window to backup. We have to figure out a problem, diagnose it, and do all kind of things.

Management issues will be important ones, especially in distributed environments. That is why self-discovery techniques like Jini will be important. You will have intelligence in the device.

When you have individual devices announcing their properties, storage will become an independent entity with intelligence in how it will be applied to the infrastructure. (A device can say "this is what I am, these are my properties, you can take advantage of me.")

This affects more than SANs, it affects overall storage networking and can deal with the Internet. The question, too, that we're moving towards more and more is two trends; personalized storage and depersonalized storage. Personalized storage is anything from a CD-ROM to a hard disk to anything that you personally control; it gets into departments. In the Enterprise at that level, it's personal control.

Depersonalized control allows you to outsource for data management. People use Microsoft Office to store to a file on the Internet, rather than on a local file. They've given the responsibility to someone else to manage it and have to have confidence that they can do that.

Let's say I do my own tax returns. I keep them on my own PC, for example. At some point, I don't care where it is. If I have it stored in a central place, I can have access to it from anywhere. If I can keep it on laptop and keep it there and want go to the desktop, I have to go through creating it again. If I download it to my laptop, how can I save it? If I need a file from the C: drive on my desktop at work, how do I get to it (when I'm not at work)?

An interesting thing about tape is that it gets down to how fast you can access tape and the volatility you have. I think there are a lot of huge databases where tape is a good choice. Say you want to watch a TV show that was broadcast in 1968, the 13th episode of s show that people may not want to watch very often. People keep it on tape or, for e-mail, do you want 24x7 (or can offline storage of old e-mail work)?

People who are selling tape are still locked in to selling it for backup. We will still need backup to protect against hardware catastrophes. We will still need something to restore from a prior version. If we mirror our drive and something happens to our data, guess what? We now have two corrupt databases. I think tape will play an important role.

I'm not talking about HSM (Hierarchical Storage Management); it's more like ADIC's Amass thing: virtual disk capability. A virtual disk lets you take a pool of data and move it in. It doesn't matter what the characteristics of time are; everything is on tape until I move it off the virtual disk approach. You can use hard disk as a caching mechanism for tape.

Five years from now, we'll see an extrapolation of areal density and we will see the need for greater intelligence, pooling of storage, and bifurcation into personalized and depersonalized data storage.

What's going to happen is, at some point, someone will say they will charge a lower price (for storage) and people will take advantage of that. When intelligence meets manageability, this will become a key differentiating factor.