Networked storage management software hits 10-year mark: thanks to IBM.

Information technology is thriving in a world of digital data and providing fast, reliable access to that data has become a nagging pain point for enterprise and service provider IT managers. It's a non-trivial challenge. In many cases, enterprise and service provider data storage needs double every 6 to 12 months, creating an ongoing need for new storage capacity. In fact, storage capacity purchases increascd nearly 400% between 1999 and 2000 (from 2,600 terabytes to more than 13,000 terabytes), according to Gartner Inc., and the overall storage-market revenue worldwide should top $65 billion by 2005.

Storage management, more than 10 years back, existed on monolithic machines in a very dedicated direct-attached storage (DAS) model. And, where it was present at all, it was present as a backup and archival product going from online to offline media. But then the network emerged, and the nature of storage management changed forever. Storage management over the network was an entirely different matter. Horrible words like "latency" and "bus contention" entered the storage management vocabulary.

Existing software was not optimized for the network. Furthermore, not all IT managers were committed to a regular discipline of backup and archival. It often took (and takes) catastrophic data loss to teach the lesson. But 10 years ago, IBM stepped up to the plate and developed the first backup and archival software especially for networked computing. We recount that history here, startmg on page 8.