The green trend has many facets when it comes to storage: Nearly every suggested improvement, including MAID, thin provisioning, de-duplication, and so on, is tinged with green. Whether it's general industry discussion or pundit prognostication, anything that saves resources is "in."
Virtualization. There's a growing trend toward the use of server virtualization in storage applications like disaster recovery and replication. While alternatives for storage virtualization remain diverse and relatively complex, there is also movement on that score. Given that virtualization goes hand-in-glove with resource savings, expect more in this vein.
De-Duplication. This is hands-down one of the most active areas of storage networking. It's also one of the most emotionally charged, with vendors, analysts, and passersby weighing in contentiously at every turn. Since de-dupe makes for savings, we see no cooling-off in sight.
Solid-state disks. Suppliers are starting to promote solid state disk as key to better performance of disk-based storage in the future. EMC, FalconStor, NetApp, and Sun have products and strategies in place. Solid state storage is predicted to be a factor in doubling the number of disk storage systems annually through 2012.
Services. Whether it's hosted storage, e-discovery, or online backup, storage-related services are on the rise. With suppliers like EMC and IBM building cloud-based infrastructures to provide more SaaS, users will face more decision making over the next few months.
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