Storage: More Data, but More Options to Deal with It

The high rate at which new data is being created and collected is causing many IT staffs to worry over how best to cope.  A survey conducted by InformationWeek and presented by IT freelancer Kurt Marko found that, on average, organizations are seeing a growth rate in their data volumes of about 20 percent.  And a number of organizations are even seeing data volumes growing faster than 50 percent annually.

Despite the need to manage more data, IT budgets may not be keeping up.  Budgets do look better this year, with as many as 55 percent saying that they expect their spending on IT to increase in 2011, but 26 percent of organizations say that their budget will remain flat, and 18 percent that cite reductions in their budget.  Luckily, while technology is enabling collection of ever more and larger data sets, technology is also developing to capture and manage big data.  Storage drive technology is  steadily enabling ever greater capacity and access speed at the same time that hardware costs are dropping.

The InformationWeek survey asked participants to rank their top storage concerns.  The results were as follows:

• 40 percent – Data loss and Data security
• 40 percent – Insufficient Storage Resources for Mission-Critical Applications
• 25 percent – Insufficient Storage Resources for Departmental and Individual Use
• 27 percent – Insufficient Tools for Storage Management
• 35 percent – Insufficient Budget to Meet Business Demands
• 30 percent – Insufficient Planning and Preparedness for Disaster Recovery

The report found that new technologies are simplifying the management of large amounts of data.   The new technologies include data deduplication, virtualization,thin provisioning and automatic tiering.

In the area of storage access technology, InformationWeek predicts that Fibre Channel will begin to be phased out in favor of newer technology like 10 Gigabyte Ethernet iSCSI.  As many as two-thirds of organizations are already using iSCSI for over half of their data storage.

Principles of virtualization are also now being applied to storage using a technology called thin provisioning.  Thin provisioning enables storage space to be allocated dynamically as needed.  Previously virtualized environment needed to be pre-allocated with fixed static blocks of storage.  Thin provisioning provides significantly more flexibility and efficient utilization of available storage resources.