Bangkok--9 Apr--Core & Peak 2008 is beginning a lot like 2001. If you remember 2001 we just came off a year where storage capacity grew by 100% over the growth in 1999. This growth was due to the dot com boom and the preparation for the Y2K deadline. By the end of 2001 we saw this growth rate decline to 38% and bottom out in 2002 at 26%. The reasons for this decline were the economic impacts of the dot com bust, the consolidation that followed the Y2K deadline, and new technology like Storage Area Networks which enabled the consolidation of stand-alone storage. Last year, we saw the beginnings of the housing and mortgage bust and increasing fuel prices. Towards the end of the year, we began to hear financial analysts from Goldman Sachs, UBS, and Citigroup begin to warn their investors about a softening in IT spending for 2008. Recently, Reuters reported that Forrester Research cut its 2008 global technology purchasing growth by a third. Forrester now projects that global technology purchases will grow by 6% in dollar terms versus a previous projection of 9%. Over the last three months all the market indexes, the S&P 500, NASDAQ, NIKKEI 225, FTSE 100, etc have all declined sharply. It looks like the possibility of another downturn is likely. Those of us that lived through the downturn in 2001 through 2003, saw industry revenues for storage decline as IT consolidated to meet declining budgets. Fortunately, IT was able to leverage the new technology of Storage Area Networks to consolidate their storage from direct attached storage frames with one or two TBs each to larger frames of 10 to 20 TB that were SAN attached to multiple servers. This downturn helped to drive the acceptance of FC SAN’s. Even though it required new investments in SAN infrastructure and recabling of the data center, the benefits of SAN consolidation outweighed the cost of this new technology. All of a sudden, data centers that were crammed full with storage frames saw a quarter to a third of their floor space open up. During that time HDS increased revenue and gained market share with our Lightning 9900 storage arrays whose cross bar switch architecture enabled us to replace 6 to 8 of our competitors shared bus arrays, with improved performance and connectivity. At that time we were able to rip and replace these one and two TB frames because they were direct attached and the application outages could be managed. If we go through another downturn and another phase of consolidation, we cannot afford to rip and replace. Now these storage frames are 20, 40, 100 TB or more and attached across the SAN to tens and even hundreds of applications. Any consolidation will have to be done with little or no disruption to the applications. The only way to do this would be through storage virtualization. The time is right for the virtualization of storage. This time, consolidation alone will not be enough. We will also need to increase utilization. Consolidating four or five frames that are 20% utilized onto a larger frame that is 20% utilized, will only help to decrease footprint and some power. Virtualization with thin provisioning is needed to increase utilization. We can also drive efficiency through eliminating unnecessary bits with deduplication, compression, single instance store, copy-on-write. The efficiency of operations can be increased by archiving data that is less likely to be accessed, reducing the working set of data that needs to be searched, backed up and replicated. All these technologies are available today to help us weather the coming downturn. Even if there is no downturn, these technologies will help us to be better prepared to the next wave of data explosion. In the next 5 years, I believe that Petabytes will be the norm for enterprise companies, and we will have some large companies that will have an Exabyte of storage.While IDC still believes that storage capacity will grow by 60% in 2008, they believe that “the over arching theme of storage efficiency will intensify throughout 2008 and increase the industry’s focus on virtualization strategies and green initiatives as well as information consolidation techniques like deduplication. 2008 is beginning to resemble 2001, all over again. However, we have technologies today which will help us come out of this stronger and better prepared to meet the future demands of data storage.About the Writer: Hu Yoshida, the CTO of Hitachi Data Systems, provides his insight into industry issues, discusses in his own words storage best practices, and provides realistic solutions to real storage needs in today. Yoshida is well known within the storage industry, and his blog was recently ranked among the “top 10 most influential” within the storage industry by Network World. In 2006, he was named “CTO of the Year” by Jon Toigo, and in October of 2006, Byte and Switch named him one of “Storage Networking’s Heaviest Hitters.” Check out Hu’s blog at: http://blogs.hds.com/hu/ Srisuput Siangyen Public Relations Manager Core & Peak Co., Ltd. Tel: (+66) 02 439 4600 ext. 8300 Mobile: (+66) 081 694 7807 email: [email protected]