NewsData managementInfrastructure

Hitachi Data Systems’ vice president and CTO Hu Yoshida (pictured) revealed his annual predictions for data storage developments trends for 2012. (Click here to view his storage trends predictions for 2011)

Hoshida is an author of several papers on storage area networks, Fibre Channel, multi-protocol SANs and storage virtualization technologies, and is currently chair of the Scientific Advisory Board for the Data Storage Institute of the government of Singapore.

Some of the storage issues in 2012 will include big data, and the business needs for deeper analysis outpacing the systems’ ability to ensure data relevancy, timeliness and usefulness, according to a recent IDC survey.

IT professionals will find it challenging to tackle these pressures with limited budgets, dictated by the global financial crisis, that make acquisition and rollout of new infrastructure difficult. Besides careful budget management, IT will need to accurately gauge the real impact of the systems in place, such as cloud technology, in order to build on it effectively. Such evaluation is particularly difficult amid the distortions caused by the economic crisis.   

The following are Yoshida’s top 10 storage trends for 2012:

Global economic uncertainty will require IT professionals to achieve better returns from their existing assets rather than buying new assets. There will be a greater focus on storage efficiency technologies such as storage virtualization, dynamic or thin provisioning, dynamic tiering, and archiving

Consolidation will give way to convergence. Over the past few years IT has focused on consolidation and much of the low-hanging fruit has now been consolidated. In order to gain further cost savings, the focus will be on convergence of server, storage, networks, and applications.

Application programming interfaces (APIs), which offload workload to storage, can make the servers and memory more efficient. Orchestration software will help to converge the management and automate the provisioning, and reporting across local, remote, and cloud-based server, storage, and network infrastructures. 

Applications and infrastructure will be more transparent with each other in order to facilitate convergence through open interfaces like APIs, client/providers, and plugins.

 

Storage systems will need to become storage computers as more functions are being driven down into them. Old storage architectures with general purpose controllers which service all these new functions along with the normal I/O workload will not be able to scale. New storage architectures with separate pools of processors will be required to handle these additional functions.

The big hype for 2012 will continue to be around “Big Data”. The explosion of unstructured data and mobile applications will generate a huge opportunity for the creation of business value, competitive advantage, and decision support if this data can be managed and accessed efficiently. The massive size of Big Data sets will make it impractical to replicate, back up, and mine through traditional means. Big Data will be more about the information that can be derived from the intersections of many data sets or objects. In 2012, there will be greater adoption of content platforms in preparation for Big Data analytics.