Network Computing is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

What a Year: Page 2 of 3

There were notable advances in technology. Solid-state disks started to become mainstream as major storage systems vendors introduced products or announced plans to do so that included the super-fast and very expensive technology. Some proponents argued that it is time to shift storage metrics from cost per gigabyte to cost per IOPS, which would favor SSDs. Data de-deduplication applications became a must-have way to cut back on the need for more capacity. We also saw new and faster flavors of Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and InfiniBand.

The big issue remains the amount of data that has to be stored, and the rules and regulations that require keeping it for longer periods of time. And it is not just email. More companies are collecting and keeping audio and video from surveillance systems, teleconference, text and video blogs, and things like Webcasts.

That is causing some small businesses and many consumers to begin using cloud storage services, and a host of vendors to enter the market and offer online backup services at very low prices. Cloud storage, the less-popular sibling of cloud computing, hasn't achieved much market traction with enterprise IT managers, who are reluctant to trust their crucial data to a third party. But such services may gain in appeal if tech budgets continue to decline and companies look to simplify their infrastructures. In the interim, companies are exploring building their own private clouds as a way to provide computing and storage services to workers. EMC gave the market a big boost when it introduced Atmos, a platform for building private or public clouds.

One thing didn't change -- you can buy more storage capacity for less money. That trend will probably continue in 2009, which may be the best news for storage administrators facing severe budget pressures.

Note to Readers: Byte and Switch is scaling back operations a bit during the holidays to let our staff spend some time with family and friends. Our daily newsletter will resume publishing on Jan. 5, but we will continue publishing this weekly newsletter and cover important industry news and announcements during this period. We hope you and yours have happy holidays, and we wish you good fortune in 2009.