The storage market is teeming with size and density improvement on all levels. NAS is becoming smaller and easier to implement, SAN remains complex while shrinking in size, tape drives hold more, and autoloaders fit in smaller spaces. Speed is on its way up and costs are on their way down. Buckle up and we'll go on a spin around the data storage heart of the IT industry.

Storage Management

The only place where comprehensive improvement is needed is in management. Traditionally, we've had backup software, SCSI and Fibre Channel hardware tools, and management tools for the data itself, with OSes to divvy up the space. Today, we're seeing packages that integrate some or all these functions, plus storage virtualization. Herein lies the confusion. No package does it all, though some packages do many or even most storage tasks. Will such a tool be a panacea or an out-of-control enterprise-spanning octopus? With the current disparity in technologies, the latter looks likelier. As the market continues converging on IP storage, the development of powerful, useful tools will become easier.

Storage Virtualization

A hot category in 2002 will be storage virtualization. This software will let you collect all your discrete storage into one logical pool.

Storage at most companies is at roughly 60 percent utilization for a variety of reasons, including standardized buying practices, where a one-disk-fits-all approach is used; bulk-buying discounts on large amounts of storage, with a "we'll need it someday" attitude; and, above all, the inability to use the extra space on one server to fulfill needs elsewhere. Storage virtualization software allows for the dynamic allocation of storage from one system to the next without physically moving the disks. When the e-mail server is ready to burst at the seams while the collaboration system server is sitting with 500 GB free, you can dynamically allocate storage to your mail server and save the day.

Full interoperability is a way off yet, but watch for important strides.

NAS Technologies

The NAS marketplace has seen many changes in the past year. The midrange NAS market is feeling pressure from both the top (as high-end equipment prices drop) and the bottom (as low-end equipment offers more features, such as snapshots and external SCSI connectors suitable for local tape attachment). To protect themselves, midrange vendors have been lowering prices while increasing density and features. It's a beautiful display of free-market economics at work.

With high-end NAS prices dropping, that equipment falls into the midrange market. Meanwhile, low-end NAS devices are pushing into the midrange market with the proliferation of inexpensive and large-capacity IDE disk drives. The only downside, and it's minor, is the increasing difficulty in distinguishing device categories.