Answer: Pretty far. Over the past five years, we've seen advertising income contribute to substantial innovation in the Internet software domain. Storage has been both an indirect and a direct beneficiary of this trend with the creation of infrastructures that storage services can exploit and development of new storage innovations such as the Google File System (GFS). While not available as a commercial product, GFS has gripped the computer science world and further advanced the idea of building massively distributed systems on the notion that components will fail and prompt recovery can be designed into the system.
Perhaps not coincidentally, these advancements have occurred simultaneous to an explosion in unstructured data.
The extent to which Google and other consumer service providers will encroach on the enterprise storage domain remains a function of: 1) how far businesses will allow advertising models to permeate corporate walls, and 2) how aggressively traditional storage vendors respond. It seems apparent that adoption by small- and mid-sized businesses is forthcoming, however delivering integrated sets of storage services for the enterprise will probably require active participation of established storage leaders. Remote backup, file services, remote replication, C-site services specialized archiving (e.g. email archiving) and compliance applications are likely candidates for new services models to emerge. Do established storage vendors have anything to offer here? You bet; the question is when and how fast will they respond.
Action Item: Established storage industry participants and upstarts in the ecosystem must not sit back and wait. Rather, they must respond to increasing pressure to adopt consumerized IT models. This means packaging offerings that support a storage services vision and include SaaS, channel partnerships with service providers, metering and monitoring software, more competitive pricing and attempts to leverage existing storage assets as applied to storage services.
