Hot on the heels of our last installment comes the next in our Experts Corner Q&A series with industry thought leaders discussing the world of storage and the future of the industry. We recently caught up with Tony Asaro of Contemplating IT to ask a few questions on where he sees the industry heading, especially regarding the cloud, managing data and the future of storage. Tony has been in the IT industry for over 23 yeas as a system engineer, product manager, business development and marketing executive, entrepreneur, and as an industry analyst and consultant. Tony has focused heavily on storage, data management and virtualization technologies and products.
i365: In a recent blog post, you discuss the hype around Information Lifecycle Management a few years back and how that hype has declined. You also point out, however, that many of ILM’s ideas–matching data to the right storage environment in order to balance cost, performance, and security–have been realized to some extent. How does cloud storage fit into this as a new way by which to store data?
TA: It is important to define cloud storage. There are two kinds of clouds – public and private. Many companies are considering how to make their IT environments more of a utility by creating private clouds. Whereas, public clouds are infrastructure resources – compute and storage – that are accessible over the Internet.
Using a lower tier of storage is already a part of ILM but the technology has not quite lived to the promise of the concept. This is in great part because with the amount of data being created there is no way to manually assess the use and value of data. Therefore, the storage systems themselves need to be smart enough to determine – based on policy – where to place data. However, the vast majority of storage systems do not have this capability. There are exceptions and I believe that 2010 will be the year of storage-based ILM or what I call intelligent tiered storage.
Private and public cloud storage can play a role as a lower tier of storage. But we must have the technologies to determine what needs to be moved, the ability to move it transparently, and the cost structures have to be simple to understand and justify.
i365: Following up on that, do you see the hype around “cloud computing” going the same way of ILM and only having a moderate effect on businesses? Or is cloud computing/cloud storage a realization of something bigger?
TA: Before I answer that question I think it is important to note my answer to your first question. I believe that storage-based ILM is going to be a big deal in 2010 and beyond. It is often the case with technology that it takes time for it catch up with the hype. And I believe the impact will be tremendous, saving enormous amounts of money for customers.
The cloud hype eclipses ILM but so does the opportunity. According to IDC the cloud market is already tens of billions of dollars. But they define IT clouds as online application services as well as services such as CPU and storage. So it all comes down to your definition and therein lies the confusion. We are all saying the same words but in many cases it means different things to different people.
Some IT professionals consider IT clouds to be their virtual data center. If that is the case then we have IT clouds all over the place. And it will be the evolution of the virtual data center that will be important. The more we virtualize physical infrastructure, the greater levels of optimization, utilization, agility and flexibility. Additionally, we need to be mindful of managing, analyzing and being able to get information on our virtual data centers as well. It is also important to have multi-tenancy to create true IT utilities – creating virtual domains so physical infrastructure can be shared without loss of performance, reliability or security.
Public IT clouds are already enabling new businesses. Amazon S3 has over a billion objects stored on their infrastructure and that number is growing. I also see public IT clouds as a complement to customer data centers and their private IT clouds over time.
i365: Your post “Your Data Needs Diet and Exercise!” discusses the pressing need for the storage ecosystem – both vendors and customers – to work on new ways to make the exponential increase in worldwide data manageable. Are there any major innovations you see happening in the next few years that will make this happen?
TA: It is pretty amazing how much data we store compared to how much we actually use. We talk about the growth of data but really what we are talking about is the growth of unusable data. But we keep all of our data because it is relatively inexpensive for us to do so and the risk of losing something we may need for business or compliance offers enough risk to justify it. Additionally, since data is growing at such a rapid rate and companies are dealing with 100s of TBs and PBs, there is no way to classify data. Therefore we just keep storing lots of lots of data that we will never use again. I contend that if we are going to keep storing all this data we might as well make some use of it.
Okay – to answer your question there are a few things that need to happen. We already have storage technologies that make better use of physical storage infrastructure such as thin provisioning and data deduplication. As I mentioned above I believe that a number of storage systems will provide granular and automated tiering. That is the optimization side.
In order to make our data more useful we need to put structure around unstructured content. I believe that one of the biggest advancements will be to have technologies and tools that integrate unstructured content into databases and enterprise content management systems.
i365: Given your extensive background and expertise in the storage world, it would be great to hear your perspective on what big trends you see on the horizon and how you see them affecting current trends and existing infrastructures.
TA: I mentioned intelligent tiered storage. I think this will be a big deal in 2010 and it can save a significant amount of costs in the data center. For the larger shops it can result in millions saved.
Disk-to-disk backup with data dedupe will graduate to the mainstream and will continue on its path to being pervasive.
Greater integration between the unstructured and structured content tools and applications.
FCoE on its surface is a good thing – consolidating the network, potentially reducing cable spaghetti, reducing infrastructure costs, etc. I think the bigger implications of a converged network is creating correlation between protocols. In other words, with data storage giving us the ability to have object and file-level awareness while maintaining the performance of SAN. With FCoE – all storage protocols will share the same infrastructure and the realization of this can be achieved cost effectively. This will take time and won’t happen next year but we can begin to move in that direction.
Tags: cloud computing, Disk-to-Disk Backup, ILM, Tiered Storage