The amount of digital information created and replicated each year will reach 988 billion gigabytes by 2010, according to an IDC report sponsored by EMC. The report said that by 2010, nearly 70 percent of the digital universe information will be created by individuals, and organizations will be responsible for the security, privacy, reliability and compliance of at least 85 percent of that information.

We discuss below some of the trends that will shape the enterprise storage space in the next year and help address the issues of security, disaster recovery, capacity, compliance and disk utilization even while reducing operating and storage management costs.

Storage virtualization
Virtualization continues to be the buzzword in IT circles. According to industry analysts, the need to reduce data center complexity and cost, improve utilization levels, and help control the servers and storage sprawling within enterprises is the top driver for storage virtualization. Storage virtualization techniques and technologies are aimed at reducing electrical power, cooling and floor space requirements while improving asset utilization, service delivery and ease of management.

Though a major trend, storage virtualization has still to gain wide acceptance among enterprises. As per an IDC end-user survey across the Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) region in 2007, though there has been a lot of interest and excitement in the server virtualization space, the same enthusiasm has been slower to appear on the storage front.

“Storage virtualization will allow organizations to have a stronger strategy of tiered storage. They can take an application like Exchange or Oracle and put it on the correct tier of storage, which could be a low-cost storage virtualized to a high-performing enterprise platform,” says Phil Gann, director, enterprise storage, APAC, Hitachi.

Before embarking on a large-scale server consolidation project, IT managers should carefully plan storage infrastructure and consider how best to optimize the infrastructure for both the server and storage domains. As IT managers plan how best to incorporate server virtualization in their own environments, they need to address a series of storage-related challenges that, when taken together, can make or break a deployment.

Thin provisioning
Another trend in the enterprise storage space is a technique called thin provisioning. Here, storage resources are provisioned for an application but are not allocated storage space until there is a need for it.

Industry experts opine that thin provisioning of storage would allow enterprises a lower total cost of ownership (TCO), simplify their storage, and ensure business continuity. According to industry estimates, thin provisioning benefits data centers by improving storage utilization by 65-85 percent.

“With thin provisioning, the acquisition cost of storage reduces and it also facilitates easier management of storage hardware,” explains Aman Munglani, principal research analyst, Gartner.

Tiered storage
Organizations need ways to improve their storage capacity utilization and optimize storage costs based on the value of data. Industry insiders say that implementing a tiered storage structure can help overcome key data management challenges such as increased storage requirements placed on primary (expensive) storage while secondary storage remains underutilized, inability to effectively place data on different types of storage based on their relative business value, and the high cost of backup in the absence of appropriate classification of data resulting in excess data protection for data that is not mission-critical.

Storage network security
The advantages of networked data storage technologies such as network-attached storage (NAS) and storage area networks (SAN) are well-established, but storing an organization’s data on a network creates significant security risks. Data in networked storage environments is significantly more vulnerable to unauthorized access, theft or misuse than data stored in more traditional, direct-attached storage.

According to Sundeep Oberoi, global head, information risk management products, TCS, SAN security is not as well thought out as IP security. “There needs to be a multi-faceted approach to security including both technical and non-technical layers to protect resources,” he says.

Adds Soumitra Agarwal, marketing director, India, Network Appliance, “Businesses that don’t encrypt sensitive data will spend a lot of money on corrective measures and reparations because of failure to comply with regulatory or contractual data protection requirements. A unified platform for securing stored data across the enterprise, with support for the NAS, DAS, SAN, tape and iSCSI environments, would be an optimal solution for data centers to protect data assets.”

Yet storage encryption has some key issues that still need to be addressed. “Existing commercial storage encryption solutions are not inter-operable. There are concerns with data recovery, and they may contain proprietary schemes,” points out Oberoi.