Bangkok--14 Mar--Core & Peak Storage requirements are increasing each year as storage environments grow more complex. Some key issues that organizations face in planning their storage infrastructure include security, disaster recovery, capacity, compliance and disk utilization. In addition, IT managers are constantly mentioning the need to reduce operating and storage management costs. With global technology spending expected to go down due to the U.S. economic downturn, companies are under even more pressure to ensure that they can get the most out of their IT expenditure. Companies grappling with issues of cost, management and resource allocation within their storage infrastructure can take heed. New technologies are available to help address their issues. According to Hu Yoshida, CTO of Hitachi Data Systems, 2008 will see the rise of technologies like data de-duplication, thin provisioning and services-oriented storage. The rise of these technologies is timely as most IT organizations within companies are facing rapid data growth, shrinking IT budgets and higher expectations. The following are the top five key technology advances that will impact businesses in 2008: 1. Control unit virtualisation of storage will help companies add value to their existing storage arrays. A control unit based approach to virtualisation is able to leverage all the rich functionality of the control unit to enhance the functionality of lower cost or legacy tiers of storage arrays. A control unit based approach to virtualisation will enable less capable storage systems to utilise the value added services in that control unit like data mobility functions or thin provisioning capabilities. 2. Services-oriented storage will become a requisite complement to Services Oriented Architecture: Services Oriented Storage will become a requisite complement to Services Oriented Architecture in the application space and to Services Oriented Infrastructure in the infrastructure space in order to achieve the dynamic data centre of the future. Services Oriented Storage requires a virtualisation layer in the storage control unit which enables other storage systems to leverage its services like a high performance global cache, distance replication, tiered storage, and thin provisioning. 3. Content, file, and block based storage services will converge to a common virtualization platform: Instead of separate stove pipe storage systems for content (archive), file and block storage system, we will see the convergence of these storage types to a common virtualisation platform. High availability clusters of content servers and file servers will use a common block virtualisation services platform, under one common set of management tools. This will enable content servers or file servers to leverage common block services like distance replication, thin provisioning, or virtualisation of heterogeneous storage systems 4. Thin provisioning can help companies increase storage utilization: Thin provisioning will provide the biggest benefit in increasing the utilisation of storage by eliminating the waste of allocated but unused storage capacity. This savings is multiplied many times over by eliminating the need to copy that allocated but unused capacity every time a copy is required for backup cycles, replication, data mining, development test and data distribution. This ability to increase utilisation will be embraced by Green advocate and will be seen as a way to contain costs. 5. Deduplication will be key in reducing the cost of storing data: Deduplication is especially effective in eliminating duplicated data in backups. The ability to reduce a stream of data by 20 to 30 times will be extremely valuable in reducing the cost of storing data to the point that it will be feasible to store backup data to disk rather than to tape where the operational, availability, and reliability characteristics are better. Other forms of deduplication like single instance store for archives, and copy on write for snapshots will become more prevalent. Storage trends are changing with the times. The rapid growth of data needs has exceeded what existing data storage solutions are able to handle. It is impossible to merely keep adding additional data storage equipment due to lack of floor space. Companies are in dire need of new solutions to their storage woes. Moving into 2008, companies certainly have a reason to be optimistic about their storage needs. The rise of these new technologies will help them to derive maximum benefit out of their storage expenditure. This will lead to operating and storage management cost savings for the company. In addition, they will be able to cope with their ever increasing data storage needs without fear of overrunning their floor capacity or budgets. It is up to IT managers to adopt these new changes for the benefit of their companies.