The state of storage: demand for digital assets greater than ever. (Storage Networking).

Everyone knows that IT purchasing has been on the decline during the last couple of years due to a number of factors including over-purchasing during the dot.com boom, a soft overall economy, and an increased skepticism and uncertainty about the burgeoning number of storage systems and solutions on the market today. The outlook for 2003 is conservative at best with IDC analysts predicting 5.8 percent growth rate for the storage industry worldwide.

On the other hand, the demand for storage of digital assets has never been greater. There are increased capacity requirements for virtually every application of computer systems. Data-intensive applications such as image and video recording and processing, voice recognition, data warehousing, email and Internet downloading, wireless and ecommerce are driving demand for large automated storage systems and subsystems. Traditional methods of resolving these increased capacity requirements, such as increasing the amount of magnetic disks, are often too costly. IT departments are forced to "do more with less."

Enterprises must balance the needs for effective data protection against the need to focus on their core businesses, while minimizing cap-ex investments. Cost-conscious CIOs and IT leaders are looking for ways to add new storage or modify existing investments to allow all kinds of data to be served from any device over any network architecture. Integration is key in this process.

Customers more than ever before want to feel confident that their technology partners are reliable and will be around for the long haul. The corporate buying decisions are being fueled by credibility around products, service, and business management.

Quantum SSG storage industry predictions:

* Network storage, which today only represents 30 percent of the storage implementations, will be fully adopted.

* Internet technology will finally realize the vision of a "Web tone"--like a dial tone, Web access will be always on and available--which will enable a much broader set of applications to be used over the Internet.

* Internet Protocol (IP) storage will become prevalent.

* Systems solutions will have much more intelligence in them to help IT users protect and manage the data easily without a lot of IT intervention.

* Solutions-oriented products will be as common as generic storage systems. Products will be more optimized to solve customer problems, instead of delivering raw technology.

* Modularity in storage solutions will become even more critical than it is today, as customers will want to easily build upon their previous investments and "buy-as-they-go."

* Words such as "virtualization" will disappear as aspects of this will be included in products and invisible to the end user.

* Software will manage much of this in a way that dramatically simplifies the management of storage and helps optimize the different types of storage for different uses.

* Disk-based systems will be widely used for backup in many different ways: backup, snapshots and methods for which we don't yet have names.

* Tape technology will still be the cheapest method of storage and will be used extensively, especially in archive.

The trends that we will discuss in this article are interoperability, the continued need for modular "pay as you grow" systems, the role of software in networked storage, disk and tape solutions.

Interoperability Discussion

The word "interoperability" means different things to different audiences, yet still remains a top concern for end users. People in the trade often refer to the problem as a "lack of standards," but it is really an issue of getting the vendors to agree on the standards that already exist.

Storage networking interoperability is exceedingly complex because it involves literally hundreds of vendors, many standards and initiatives, security issues and of course, end users. For example, because there are multiple vendors supplying the different components of a SAN, the complexity of implementation and troubleshooting increases exponentially. Most 112 managers want to purchase "best of breed" components for specialized storage needs and rarely do these come from one supplier.

Quantum believes that the most effective distributed, enterprise-wide storage management technologies will be built upon open standards, and is therefore actively involved in the creation, adoption and advancement of emerging industry standards through its close involvement with a variety of consortiums including SNIA, EBSI, and standards bodies and affiliations.

In 2002, Quantum took the lead to form the Enhanced Backup Solutions Initiative (EBSI). The EBSI is a coordinated effort to address these challenges with the industry's most innovative approach to backup through disk-based solutions that complement tape libraries, optimize backup performance, and provide seamless interoperability, while preserving customers' existing investments in backup hardware, software and operational procedures.

About Software

In the past, storage was merely part of the hardware that came with a computer to hold data and software drivers. Today management software is becoming an increasingly more integral component of the IT architecture and is the core of any device.

This year, vendors will roll out better software designed to make storage less expensive, easier to manage, quicker at restoring systems, and more efficient in storing data and delivering information across the network.

Modularity

Modularity in storage solutions will become even more critical than it is today, as customers will want to easily build upon their previous investments and "pay-as-you-grow." We anticipate that, in five years, customers will still be using libraries purchased today and will want to complement them with new products that can be easily mixed and matched. This is the reason Quantum took the approach of highly flexible modularity in automation in its M-series and P-series libraries. Customers can begin very small and scale up to half a Petabyte.

Storage Solutions

Solutions-oriented products will be as common as generic storage systems. Products will be more optimized to solve customer problems, instead of delivering raw technology.

While the debate about the benefits of disk vs. tape for data protection will continue, in the end, it is the protection of information that is important. Today, most experts agree that, in most enterprises, a combination of both disk-based and tape-based data protection will provide the best solution and that both technologies will continue to play a distinct roll in future storage architectures.

Recently, Quantum announced the general availability worldwide of the Quantum DX30, the industry's first disk-based backup product to combine the most valuable functionality of disk and tape into a single system. Quantum's DX-30 disk-based backup solution combines the speed and performance in backup and restore provided by disk and the cost-effective removeability and safety for long-term archiving provided by tape.

Enhanced backup provides an economical way out of this vicious cycle by utilizing low cost; ATA-based disk arrays in the backup process. These arrays become what are known as the "backup target". Rather than directing your backup to a tape drive or tape library, the initial copy of your data is made to the disk based backup target which will obviously have much faster performance characteristics than those commonly associated with tape. Note that this is very different from a cost and reliability perspective than the existing practice of allocating space on your primary array for backup data.

Enhanced backup offers a refreshing change from the "forklift upgrade" that is often required to make comparable advances in backup or restore performance. And what begins as a performance upgrade ends with the satisfaction of knowing that you are better prepared to respond to the data restoration requirements.

Some end user research conducted by Quantum revealed:

* The speed and reliability of tape backup/restore and the high cost of disk-based data protection remain significant customer pain points

* Across applications, customers identify a 2x gap between desired and actual backup time windows

* Existing solutions fall short on cost, proprietary nature, and/or complexity

So the limitations in backup are the backup and restore windows, speed and reliability, and the limitations in data protection are expense, complexity, and proprietary nature of systems.

Summary

The burst of the Internet bubble has led many to speculate that the best of times for the high-tech industry are over. Given the current economic environment, customers want to know that additional investments in IT will lead to worthwhile increases in productivity, reliability, security, and profitability.

The landscape of our industry in 2003 will continue to change rapidly as businesses get even more focused on selecting a handful of strategic partners to help them drive out cost, integrate technologies that provide significant business advantage or productivity gains.

Standards-based technologies that are cost-effective to purchase, maintain, and replace are the future of network storage. Partnerships are key. Trust is critical, as are profitability and sound business planning. In 2003, customers will continue to demand high quality and reliable products. But they'll also want to feel confident that their technology partners are reliable and will be around for the long run.

Michael Del Rosso is chief technology officer for Quantum Storage Solutions Group (Milpitas, CA).

www.quantum.com