About a month ago I started to put some thought and research into what might emerge as the top trends of 2012 by keeping a notebook next to my keyboard so as ideas struck me I could jot them down. Now as I look at the four trends that made today’s short list, they ended up being on the surface ones that I hear, write and talk about every day.
Using the “cloud” for backup is the primary context in which people think about the cloud when asked about it. Yet if forced to list what features an “enterprise cloud-based backup provider” offers, it is questionable if one could do so. So as DCIG prepares to release its inaugural Buyer’s Guide in 2012 on Enterprise Cloud-based Backup products, one of its first tasks was to define what constitutes an “enterprise cloud-based backup” offering.
You hear the words and phrases repeated in legal offices, data centers, break rooms, and boardrooms: liability, indemnity, retention, regulators, act of discovery, compliance. The discomforting sound of Information Governance contains echoes of cost, complexity, inconvenience, and potential penalties.
Everyone asks, “Is tape dead?” Personally, I think that question is ridiculous. There will always be a demand for tape. The better question is, “How is the tape industry evolving to ensure tape remains relevant as a solution to address current technology trends such as “Big Data,” “the Cloud” and virtualization?” This is the more pressing question regarding tape’s future to which Spectra Logic provided some excellent answers this past week at its first ever analyst and press event.
The recent outage at Amazon Web Services coupled with the news that Iron Mountain is exiting some of its storage cloud lines of business has created quite a stir in the storage industry. But many of the conversations in which I have been involved have centered on how some users have been – consciously or unconsciously – applying enterprise expectations to the services that existing cloud storage providers offer. So the questions becomes, “Who is responsible for creating these unrealisticly high expectations – cloud service providers, users or some combination of both?”
Having come out of the data center and spent many years now as an analyst, it is difficult for me to get overly excited about any new storage technologies that I see at Storage Networking World (SNW.) While these technologies are most certainly “cool,” in the stoic world of storage the odds of them going “hot” are often slim. But at this Spring 2011 SNW, the Nimbus Data Systems S-class and HP Data Protector Instant Recovery look to have above average chances of breaking through.
In the articles, blog entries, case studies and executive white papers that DCIG writes it often uses the terms small and midsize business (SMB,) small and midsize enterprise (SME) and large enterprise. However someone after reading these terms in one of my blog entries called to ask me, “What is the difference between them?”
As part of the early research process for the DCIG 2011 Scale-Out NAS Buyer’s Guide we came to find that trying to do a side-by-side comparison all of the products in the scale-out NAS space was a bit like trying to compare different fruit in a fruit basket. To a certain degree we expected some apples and oranges but we found ourselves with a lot of pineapples, mangos and even an African horned melon or two mixed in. The diversity of how Scale-Out NAS solutions are implemented has provided a unique opportunity for DCIG to step back and re-examine our approach to preparing this Buyer’s Guide with a fresh eye.
As more organizations explore the possibility of moving data into the cloud, the first question they are bound to ask is, “How do we seamlessly move what we already have into the cloud?” No organizations are more concerned with this transparent data movement than service providers and enterprises that have a lot to gain but just as much to lose if problems arise.
In the last few years more backup software vendors have abandoned traditional methods of software licensing that is based upon the total numbers of applications, CPUs, servers or some combination thereof. Instead they switching to a capacity based software licensing model where users get all of their product’s software features and then only pay a monthly or annual fee based upon the total amount of storage capacity consumed.
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