Researchers say disk storage needs poised to rocket

By ADAM GIFFORD

Research company International Data Corporation (IDC) believes New Zealand disk storage needs will rocket over the next three years.

It estimates that 258 terabytes (258,000 gigabytes) of new disk storage was shipped into NZ last year.

In 2004, IDC expects the market here to soak up at least 4012 terabytes, representing 73 per cent compound annual growth.

Meanwhile the price of storage per megabyte is dropping 3 per cent a month - about 35 per cent a year.

Moving to e-business is creating huge extra demand, as paper records disappear and data must be acquired, managed, analysed, backed up and archived electronically.

"People don't understand the demand e-mail places on storage resources," says IDC's storage research director for Asia Pacific, Graham Penn.

In Auckland yesterday more than 100 people turned out to hear IDC analysts and storage vendors discuss "confronting the storage explosion."

IDC has found the number of servers in an organisation typically doubles over five years, while storage will increase tenfold.

"And if you think head count or budget is going to go up 10 times to manage this storage, you've got rocks in your head," said Mr Penn.

The only way to handle the growth was to redesign your approach, he said.

Storage now typically accounted for half the value of hardware orders, and in some cases up to 75 per cent, he said. "What's more, storage gets upgraded more frequently than servers, as it keeps getting added."

People at the conference "haven't been from the big end of town," Mr Penn said.

"The guys with the IBM System 390s, they've been doing this for years. It's the guys in the Unix and Windows NT environments who are suddenly having to address issues which have been solved by mainframers years ago like data replication, business continuity."

Adding host-attached storage - storage in or connected directly to the server - was no longer enough. Firms were increasingly exploring network-attached storage (NAS) or storage-area networks (SAN), when new-generation connection standards, mainly fibre channel, were used to link any number of servers to a multitude of storage devices.

Mr Penn said the NAS model was driving sales of storage "appliances" from the likes of Compaq and Network Appliance, while storage company EMC, the market leader, was benefiting from the development of SANs, which were a more costly and complex alternative.

"Every man and his dog will have a storage appliance in the market soon."

Mr Penn said large New Zealand organisations typically had a distributed computing environment, with servers sitting in regional branches.

To get their growing data under control, they were buying systems that allowed them to manage storage centrally, even if the servers stayed in the branches.

In a decentralised operation, one person could manage only 100 to 250 gigabytes of storage - managing device outages and software outages, swapping and labelling tapes and troubleshooting user problems.

That was why real savings could be made managing storage from a central console, Mr Penn said.

While much of the buzz was about disk storage systems, he said, new technologies were giving tape systems a new lease of life.

"Tape will be round for a long while." He said it was useful for backing up and restoring, and archiving.

Mr Penn said some systems were using tape automation systems, but spinning the data out on disks running as virtual tape systems.

"While disks are still more expensive than tape, just by wheeling out more disks you are saving on management costs. Even for the largest tape libraries, there is still manual intervention.

"One reason people are paying for storage area networks is it's cheaper to spend your money on hardware and pipes than to continue to pay people to manage."

Mr Penn said he expected storage-service provision to develop as a business rapidly over the next three years.

"There are economies of scale [in] moving to [storage-service provision]."