2010: A data odyssey?

Nunes: Datacentre transformation is surely well under way this year

In Arthur C Clarke’s 1968 science fiction novel 2001: A Space Odyssey and its various sequelae, a prehistoric monolith is said to be responsible for awakening intelligence in humankind. In Clarke’s world, the years 2001 to 2010 find people not only dealing with artificial intelligence in computers gone awry, but struggling to understand the nature of human intelligence.

This much is true: that intelligence and ingenuity are key themes for 2010 now we are here – not least in the enterprise datacentre. Physical servers and fat storage that suck power and drink cooling resources are humming themselves into obsolescence. Datacentre equipment is getting more energy efficient while the advent of the virtual machine and thin provisioning have begun to change IT.

This year I think we will see virtualisation continue to pervade nearly every aspect of the datacentre as technological development focuses on the intelligence and flexibility to enhance virtual datacentre efficiency and agility.

This means autonomic – or self-managing – storage that eliminates the human element in configuration, monitoring and optimisation, and the convergence of SAN topologies such as Fibre Channel over Ethernet or traditional Fibre Channel and iSCSI. It also refers to the integration of primary storage capacity reduction technologies into the virtual datacentre.

We will see the cloud continue to draw much attention and gather momentum. But 2010 is also the year we see the real players emerge from a sea of vendors with ‘me too’ marketing campaigns. A new crop of cloud innovators is getting it right, with cloud-intelligent, hyper-flexible, mega-customisable gear designed with cloud computing in mind.

An example is agile, intelligent storage arrays armed with active-mesh, quad-node architectures and autonomic features. Such innovations will unlock many new worlds, and not just for the enterprise.

With all the merger and acquisition activity last year, it is easier than ever to fulfil all one’s IT infrastructure needs from one brand – for servers, storage, networking and even middleware. While this may be a boon for organisations without their own basic integration capabilities, it may conflict with the business model of cloud computing.

If cloud service providers compete among themselves with essentially the same vertical stack infrastructure, that reduces their ability to differentiate. The pricing leverage could move to their infrastructure providers.

If cloud providers create a heterogeneous setup instead – choosing best-of-breed servers, storage, networks and middleware – they can use in-house integration skills to differentiate their cloud services. That helps them keep pricing leverage and control of the profit pool.

Economic pressure combined with faster, more efficient disk-based backup and data archiving will force tape increasingly into the great archive of antiquated IT. Speed is the key in backup and recovery, so we will see more offerings that look like tape but perform faster. Combine this with functions such as smart deduplication and it gets even more interesting. There will eventually be a chance for smart corporate-wide blending of deduplication and storage capabilities, through server-based appliances that intelligently dedupe data before backing it up.

This time next year, these trends will be in full swing. We have seen no slowdown in the creation of data despite the globally tough times. And businesses are starved for IT innovation that will maintain competitiveness and profitability.

Craig Nunes is vice president of marketing at 3PAR