Our friends at HP recently shared their perspective on storage trends for 2009 that have emerged from discussions over the past year with customers, technology partners, and analysts. These trends are not new, but are being accelerated now by the overall global economic climate, says Kyle Fitze, marketing director for the storage platform division in StorageWorks.
A key trend that will only escalate is that of virtualization. As the need to store more data only continues to grow, organizations are looking to virtualize their storage environments to achieve the similar benefits they've seen from server virtualization, according to HP. This is a result of hardware sprawl and multifaceted storage systems that are forcing organizations to consolidate and create "shared data" architectures in order to manage IT infrastructures that will only become more complex over the years.
Other trends in the storage arena that are expected to increase in 2009 include an expansion of cloud-based storage solutions that address the challenges of data growth; as well as deduplication, which by increasing disk utilization, reduces storage costs and improves mission-critical capabilities such as disaster recovery. Use of solid state storage technology; and an emphasis on secure storage are additional trends expected to accelerate.
As customers' concern heightens about operating expenses, return on investment from IT, their staffing, energy usage and the uncertainty ahead in 2009, Fitze observes these trends will actually serve to benefit them as they seek to lower their costs across the board.
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