Pro-active storage management on 2004 horizon.

The history of the storage industry has been marked by a continual upward or improving trend line that was evident in just about every statistic that could be measured--until the year 2001. In 2001, things began to change. Growth rates slowed, storage revenue declined globally, thousands of IT jobs were eliminated, and the economy entered a deep and lasting slump. We are still in this economic trough and its impact on the storage industry will have lasting effects that will alter many aspects of the storage industry. In essence, the rules and value of the storage industry will make this a new game when we finally emerge from the grip of the downturn.

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It's not clear when we will firmly establish firm financial growth again, but when we do, we should expect things to be different. End users and vendors alike will have had more than three years to re-think what works and what doesn't work anymore. This cooling-off period is also being characterized by a slower rate of change than at any previous time since the early 1990s. Venture capital money and new business ideas are only creeping into the system, further slowing innovation. Only business plans that solve real problems are being funded. Vendor roadmaps are being pushed out as storage vendors derive lower profitability and, therefore, have less money to invest in their future.

Most users today still look at the hardware purchase price as their primary purchase criteria. This has become increasingly unfortunate and reflects the now old and out-of-date viewpoint that the value of the IT infrastructure exists in hardware. This is like measuring the value of the television industry by the number of sets sold (the old rules) rather than the value of the content being transmitted by television (the new rules). With hardware prices falling at 35-40% annually, the value of the storage industry shifts to what we do with the data, not where we store it.

With high availability on the top of the list for every IT-oriented business, today's goal to achieve the mainframe level of five 9s system availability must but will struggle to spread beyond the mainframe to the Unix, Linux and, hopefully, the Win2K platforms. This will happen more quickly for some platforms than others based on inherent limiting architectural design issues.

As we debate and implement as many as three different storage topologies, SAN, NAS and DAS, the future value of the storage network will lie in eliminating this decision completely. Look for the storage fabric or network to decide where data is stored, as self-managed storage networks should eventually replace all three topologies. For now, outgrowing DAS can be painful.

Historically, storage vendors have described scalability in terms of capacity increases and limits but, as we have learned in the past year, if you don't scale performance and capacity at the same rate, throughput bottlenecks result and the overall capability of the subsystem decreases. Sharp vendors will begin to address scalability in two dimensions to be successful. Connectivity will join the scalability formula too, though some time after capacity and performance become the primary tenants of scalability.

For years, most non-mainframe businesses have stated that backup and recovery is their single biggest headache. The process is often disruptive and it remains difficult to control, often requiring several dissimilar and incompatible software products. For storage management software vendors, a single software solution that manages the backup and recovery for file and block based-applications in centralized and distributed systems will have the most success. As the Unix, Linux and Win2K (formerly called open systems) storage environments have become increasingly larger, a de-facto standard and user-friendly HSM (Hierarchical Storage Management) system must arrive and become a widely accepted and practiced method, making the nearly mandatory practice of information life cycle management attainable.

Moving storage management functions off the server, known as draining the server, and closer to or into the storage fabric or network to minimize host resource consumption and dramatically improve storage management, will become one of the major new architectural directions for the storage industry. Server-less or out-board storage management functions will evolve beyond backup and recovery techniques to include mirroring, replication, snapshot copy, SRM and a variety of virtualization functions. Advanced or E- SRM (Extended-Storage Resource Management) products will show their real value and evolve to enable proactive or anticipatory data movement that further optimizes the storage hierarchy while easing the growing management burden. Storage subsystems, viewed using one set of management tools and utilities through a single interface, can enable storage administrators to effectively manage far more storage than ever before, noticeably reducing the widening management gap at last.

The cumbersome file and block data structures show signs of giving way to one common object-oriented storage format. Today, these systems are defined by either the location of the file system or physical location on a storage device. Object-based storage devices will begin to emerge and will be accompanied by a long-overdue taxonomy including naming conventions, indexing, access control and data attributes/properties. From this we will then move toward proactive storage management, where the storage entity understands the content and structure of the data it manages. Following this trend should give us the insight needed to close the ever-widening storage management gap.

Fault-tolerant computing and storage systems exist today and can fix themselves when a hardware or software failure occurs. Self-healing systems can fix themselves before a failure occurs. With the continued rapid progress in all aspects of microprocessors and microelectronics, look for self-healing systems to become a reality after R&D funding picks up after the current economic recession finally turns the corner. The value of self-healing systems to the high-availability equation will be unprecedented and these architectures should eventually spread to any piece of computer technology.

Driven by terrorists, hackers and other malicious types, intrusion and a growing number of data security issues are mandating that companies quickly implement dramatic improvements or completely overhaul their current porous IT security systems. These new systems will use virus detection, hyper-firewalls, advanced encryption, and spur the entire security market to grow from $17 billion in 2001 to more than $40 billion by 2006. Intrusion systems should ultimately approach bulletproof status. Getting all the way there, however, will become a difficult and over-arching goal for the storage providers. Please note that the end to the global Spam plague has not arrived.

As the battles rage in industry trade magazines and storage/network conferences over which interface will win, and the noise falls on deaf ears, the user community and vendors will at last realize and accept that de-facto standards will win and the debates will serve little real purpose. The market will make the' winning decision, not the vendors.

Open systems, interoperability? How long have we been hoping for and talking about these concepts, yet they never seem to be here. Hope is not a strategy. It will soon be time to realize that these concepts will not extend much beyond any vendor providing a few specific APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to close entities outside their own company. It's now time to strike these terms from our vocabulary and wish list for at least the next five years, and hope that existing infrastructure components can, at a minimum, co-exist in a non-disruptive manner.

Though the economic downturn and actions resulting from September 11th have impacted many aspects of our lives, this period of "storage reconciliation" will serve to change the hard and fixed rules of the past, ending some concepts that just didn't work and at the same time giving the storage industry a period of time to realize that the basic value proposition of the past no longer holds. The value is different, the game is different, and the rules for success will be different.