Chris Poelker’s Blog

Although “The times, they are a changin” are the lyrics to a real old Bob Dylan song, they sure seem to be prophetic as they pertain to the storage industry today. In just a few short years, we have seen the fall of Fibre Channel and the introduction of SAS storage as the mainstay of SAN storage. Now it seems even EMC is predicting the rise of Flash memory based drives as the new standard in storage as the prices of memory keep falling.  The reasons are clear, performance, performance, performance.

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Tape backup is still the most prevalent technology in place for dealing with data protection, and array based replication is still the most common method of protection for mission critical applications, but companies are really starting to like the idea of saving money by innovating in how they attack the largest ongoing IT costs, which is still backup and disaster recovery.

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Wow, time sure does fly. It has been a while since my last blog here! I have not just been goofing off though, believe me (maybe we can discuss this over a cold one?!) If you have not seen it yet, I have been doing some blogging over at Computerworld, and also hanging out with my buddies over at storage monkeys. My Computer world blogs have been about Cloud computing and virtualization, and I came across an interesting reply on the subject, with a link to a another good blog by Ed Koehler.

I have also been doing some research lately on technical innovations, and would love some feedback here as to which you think will be the hottest in 2010.

My current list for top 2010 technologies include:

• Data Deduplication: Still a hot item, and should be adopted by many more companies in the months to come. The return is just too high to ignore
• Cloud Computing: Do you think many companies will be outsourcing to external providers for backup, DR, Disk , and software, or is this just another fad?
• Data Center Service Consolidation: This could also be called “Integrated Data Center”, with solutions coming from multiple vendors, including an interesting joint venture between EMC, Cisco and VMware called Acadia. I would like to know your opinion if you feel companies are going to rip and replace everything and go for a datacenter in a rack solution outsourced to EMC and Cisco, running their gear either in-house or remote.
• Storage Virtualization: Server virtualization is here big time, and I think storage virtualization is the next big step for widespread adoption in 2010. Comments?
• SRM Software: With all the virtualizaiton and consolidated and cloud computing going on, someone is going to have to manage everything.
• Global File Systems: Moving to a global object model begins to make sense as geographical data placement begins to become irrelevant.
• Continuous Protection and Snapshot backups: Backup is dead. Long live backup

 I will be spending time here in the coming weeks delving deeper into each of these topics, so let me know your thoughts as to which technologies you feel will be the game changer in 2010.

Those of you who were around in the storage industry back in the late 90’s probably remember the amazing rise and fall of storage as a service, or SaaS. There was real buzz in the industry back then around outsourcing storage resources to third parties, and how it would enable companies to focus on their core business rather than IT. A few companies did fairly well until the dot com bubble burst, and the dream disapeared overnight.

Many of those startup companies lost everything back then, even though the concept and business case was sound. Well, guess what, ever hear of cloud computing? the idea is back big time, and it’s not just about storage anymore. Advances in networks, deduplication,  and virtualization for both servers and storage have finally made the concept a reality.

Within the cloud, SaaS now means both Storage as a Service AND “Software as a Service”. SalesForce.com and Google are good examples of the software SaaS space, and cloud storage SaaS companies are now poping up all over the place.

Backup and DR are the first IT functions that will be outsourced to the storage SaaS folks. In fact, my own personal computer is backing itself up to the cloud as I write this! Another force driving companies to cloud based SaaS is the fact many companies are moving away from tape based disaster recovery. Instead of just shipping tapes, large companies are coping with the idea of building out new datacenter sites to house their critical applications during a disaster.

It makes great economical sense for companies to NOT have to build out massive new data centers, and instead just purchase those functions in the cloud from a SaaS vendor at a simple price per GB (as long as the security concerns are eliminated) . Backup and DR may be the first functions to be outsourced, but as the services get better, and networks get faster, applications based on virtual servers can be run anywhere.  New services will begin to spring up in 2010 with these type of offerings.

One good example is a new offering for the legal field from a company called LegalCloud.  Another is our own PrimeVault solution, and others, which focus more on the home office front are mozy, and carbonite.

Stay tuned here to learn more about how Cloud computing, with the re-introduction of Software based SaaS, and Storage based SaaS will be impacting your IT career!�

The term virtualization has been over used and over hyped by many companies, and this misuse of the term virtualization has caused some confusion. Simply put, virtualization means “abstraction”. The virtualization solution abstracts the underlying details and complexity of whatever it is virtualizing. As an example of how confusing it can be, some companies that perform simple RAID functionality in their storage arrays sometimes market their solutions as a “virtual array”, simply because the RAID component abstracts multiple underlying physical disks into looking like a single device. RAID technology is available in almost EVERY storage array, so even though there is some abstraction involved, marketing a simple RAID array as a virtualization solution is not really ethical. Just to confuse matters even more, there are some storage arrays that actually do provide virtualization functions! So in order to understand what a true storage virtualization solution really does, you will need a proper definition of the term. 

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