Specifications

www.pcmag.com SEPTEMBER 16, 2003 PC MAGAZINE
117
D
ata storage has become both a critical corporate asset and
a major
IT management headache. Companies have seen
their storage needs double or triple annually as they
digitize documents and rely increasingly on messaging, e-commerce,
and rich media applications. The challenge hasn’t been acquiring
storage, which is inexpensive, but managing all the growth so that
IT
knows what storage is at hand and can protect it and allocate it
to users and applications that need it.
Many large corporations have turned to Fibre Channel
SANs
(storage area networks), moving stored data from their servers to
a single pooled corporate resource. Unfortunately, the hardware’s
cost and complexity have kept it out of reach for many small and
medium-size businesses. But an up-and-coming technology called
Internet
SCSI (iSCSI) will provide inexpensive SANs to this market
segment, using the standard IP network and Ethernet cards, switch-
es, and other network hardware they’re already familiar with.
Microsoft has just released an i
SCSI driver for Windows, and
Intel’s latest gigabit Ethernet chipset provides i
SCSI functions. “In
the next few years you’ll see lots of servers with on-board gigabit
Ethernet chipsets that provide native i
SCSI support, giving small and
medium businesses i
SCSI virtually for free,” says Robert Passmore, a
vice president of research firm Gartner.
Inexpensive
ATA storage is also making a big splash in networks
of all sizes, working as an addition to tape backup solutions and
providing quick data recovery. Serial
ATA (SATA), which promises
somewhat better performance and scalability than standard
ATA , will
accelerate this trend. Many IT departments will run a two-stage
backup process that copies (referred to as a snapshot) data to
network-attached storage (
NAS) or other ATA -based storage at least
once a day for quick retrieval, then makes a secondary backup on
tape, which may soon be used just for archiving purposes.
We can expect to see growth in applications such as storage
resource management (
SRM), which helps IT managers see what
storage they have and how it’s being used. “Over the next few years,
SRM vendors will start to apply expert systems capability to tell you,
for example, exactly what caused a certain event,” Passmore says.
SRM developers include IBM, which acquired Trellisoft; EMC Corp.;
Veritas, which acquired Precise Software Solutions; and Tek-Tools.
Another management category, storage virtualization, lets IT
managers slice and dice storage at will, spanning logical volumes
across drives and storage devices without requiring manual
configuration of the storage hardware. Then IT managers can
apply backup, mirroring, and other functions to the virtual storage
pools. HP,
IBM, and Veritas will be big players in this category.
Finally, information life cycle management will add true intelli-
gence to storage management by moving data automatically from
primary to secondary storage and tape, based on detailed policies
that reflect business requirements. “Life cycle management applica-
tions will apply intelligence to know, for example, that such-and-such
data belongs to Finance, and Finance treats Excel files this way,” says
Steve Kenniston, senior analyst with the Enterprise Storage Group.
Most companies will continue to see their storage needs multiply,
but over the next few years they’ll get better technologies and tools
to tame the storage monster.—Leon Erlanger
If IT managers and manufacturers have their
way, storage will be just another highly
automated network component within the
next five years.
“It will be a lights-out operation,” says Robert
Passmore, a vice president of research for
Gartner. “You’ll have racks and racks of storage
managed by a very small, specialized team. The
fundamentals, such as backup, restore, perfor-
mance optimization, and capacity expansion,
will happen automatically based on company
storage policies. The system will recognize, for
example, that a certain database needs more
storage and allocate quickly whatever that
application is authorized to use.”
Steve Kenniston, senior analyst for the Enter-
prise Storage Group, agrees. “The goal is to turn
IT into something resembling the phone com-
pany. In the future, department heads will say,
‘I need this level of service for that application
with instant recovery,’ and they’ll simply be
charged accordingly.” Data centers will be
equipped with racks and racks of blade servers,
all sharing a high-speed backplane and a giant
storage pool to provide the level of service each
department needs.
Kenniston continues: “Let’s say it’s midnight
and Finance needs to run a batch job to get end-
of-quarter numbers by morning; the necessary
processing power and storage can be allocated
accordingly.” When finished, the system can
reallocate some of those resources. HP,
IBM,
Novell, Sun, and Veritas are a few of the compa-
nies working to make this a reality.
Intelligent systems and cheaper SANs will help businesses of all sizes.
NETWORKING
Storage
In a few years more