Hu's Blog

Greg Schulz posted a very comprehensive set of predictions on his StorageIO blog.

He not only covers what he expects to see in 2010 and 2011, but also trends that will be gaining ground in 2010 and trends that will not. There is a lot to agree with and a lot to disagree with, but overall it is well worth a read. As the title of the post indicates, many of the trends and predictions will be more of the same from 2009.

Of the trends that he predicts will be “slam dunks” I agree with his first four trends:
•    More cloud conversations and confusion
•    More server, desktop, IO and storage consolidation (virtualization)
•    Data footprint impact reduction ranging from deletion to archive to compress to dedupe among others
•    SSD and in particular flash continues to evolve

There will be more discussion and confusion around cloud, but there will also be some very clear offerings around content clouds, both private and public. While most customers will not be ready to use a cloud for primary data, many will consider cloud for content or reference data as a way to reduce the storage load in their data centers. The Hitachi Content Platform is available today and provides safe multi-tenancy for content data with RESTful interfaces that can scale to tens of Petabytes through a set of federated nodes.

Server, desktop, I/O and storage virtualization will also be a major trend. Storage virtualization will be a base requirement for future growth as we move to the next level of consolidation. Storage virtualization must be done at the right level in the stack. The SNIA definition of Storage Virtualization states that it is “The act of abstracting, hiding, or isolating the internal functions of a storage system or service from the application, host computer, or general network resources, for the purpose of enabling application and network independent management of storage or data. This definitely precludes doing storage virtualization in the network, application, or host computer. In order for systems to grow to thousand of server images, tens of thousands of network connections, and hundreds of Petabytes of data and still be efficiently managed; server, desktop, I/O, networks, and storage must be virtualized so they can add function and technology refresh independent of each other. They also must be able to scale together. If the host servers scale up with new multi-core technology, the networks, and storage must also be able to scale up as I pointed out in my previous blog post.

Data foot print reduction will also be a major trend that will provide a significant ROA, Return On Assets. Our customers are becoming increasingly aware of the value of moving static data, such as content data, reference data, or stale data from active storage repositories onto a Hitachi Content Platform that can manage the life cycle of static data, and avoid the need to back this data up. As long as there are at least two copies of the data and a way to prove immutability through hashing there should be no need to do backups for this type of data. The content platform can also provide de-duplication through single instance store and provide content aware search and retrieval of objects. By removing content data we reduce the working set of active data and eliminate the operational cost of managing the same data over and over again. Payformance is a good example of how this is done.

I expect to see more use of flash drives in enterprise systems despite the fact that the price/capacity will still be about 10 times higher than spinning disk. The combination of dynamic tiered storage and Dynamic Provisioning will help to optimize the use of flash drives to make them cost effective for high performance applications. With Dynamic Provisioning we can eliminate the waste of allocated but unused space from taking up expensive flash capacity. When we combine it with dynamic tiered storage we can efficiently move thin volumes from a wide striped storage pool to a flash pool when flash performance is required. The use of flash drives and wide striping will help to address the increasing random I/O needs of high performance Virtual servers and Hyper visors with their many virtual machines stacked inside them.

There are a lot of other comments which were triggered by Greg’s post. I would be interested in any comments you may have regarding trends in storage for the current year.