Originating Author: Fred Moore
The IT industry continues to recover from the after effects of the economic downturn that began in 2001 and the spending drought that followed. Guided by emerging 21st century trends including vendor consolidation, moving jobs offshore, a growing emphasis on data security and protection, long-term data retention driven by compliance, and a continuing shortage of trained IT personnel, businesses are once again looking to lower power consumption and heat, gain utilization efficiencies and turn IT into more of a service. The continuing technology industry stampede to offshore outsourcing offers a substantial short-term savings in labor rates, but any longer-term benefits are being re-examined. The advantage is most often nullified as the savings gained from going overseas tend to disappear by the fourth year if outsourcing relationships are not redesigned. The development of a more sustainable strategy to reduce costs while maintaining a competitive advantage, and to re-invent out-of-date processes without simply transferring the labor pool, remains elusive goals for many businesses.
Recent estimates indicate worldwide disk and subsystem sales totaled over $23 billion in 2006, down from just over $31 billion in 2000. Worldwide tape, library and media sales totaled approximately $4.6 billion in 2006, roughly unchanged from 2000. IT consumers have continually asked vendors to help them lower spending, and the vendors have clearly responded as the worldwide IT community spent about the same on disk in 2006 as it did in 1996, while getting significantly more capacity, functionality and business value.
Data protection has become the most critical piece of most IT strategies today. The increasing number of data-loss causes has taken data protection, data security and disaster recovery technologies to unprecedented levels. Planning for data recovery resulting from problems with hardware, software, people, intrusion, theft and natural disasters has never existed before at this level of intensity. The best-prepared IT organizations recognize that speed is essential in recovering from whatever disaster might come to pass.
Digital storage demand is now increasing from 30 to over 50 percent annually and is expected to steadily increase for the foreseeable future. Compliance, fixed content and archive applications represent the fastest growing storage segment. Data storage needs continue to be met by magnetic disk drive technologies including both smaller-capacity and larger-capacity disk drives, each with onboard intelligence offering ever-increasing levels of stability. Magnetic tape storage has re-positioned itself for future growth because of advancements in several new, long-term data-preservation capabilities addressing fixed content and archival storage. Tape cartridge capacity has surpassed disk drive capacity in recent years and this trend is expected to continue indefinitely. Advancements in the tape industry continue to drive the price per gigabyte of automated tape storage further below economy disk.
Future tape and disk developments will increase emphasis on encryption, WORM and secure access functionality to meet the escalating compliance and data protection requirements. Beyond magnetic disk and tape, few other storage technologies are surviving in the data center. Optical disk has become the storage solution of choice for the consumer and entertainment industry, but is no longer a presence in the data center having fallen far behind magnetic recording technologies. The entertainment storage industry is growing without limits as personal appliances of all sorts abound worldwide. Within the data storage industry, the consolidation of hardware and software vendors is well under way and, in almost every segment of the industry, five or fewer companies derive in excess of 80 percent of the total revenues. Ultimately, too much consolidation leads to a lack of competitive pressure and innovation, and this aspect of the storage industry must be closely monitored as an oligopolistic structure is starting to emerge.
The IT community and the storage industry in particular are engaging in directions that are different than those of the past and are reshaping traditional methods for storing, retrieving and protecting data, requiring careful planning to comprehend the road ahead.
