By Ong Boon Kiat

NEW and maturing storage technologies combined with a brightening economy are expected to throw up interesting ways for businesses to deal with their data crunch this year.

Of the raft of new technologies tipped to make an impact this year, two related concepts - virtualisation and cloud computing - stood out, according to vendors interviewed by BizIT. They also pointed to trends like data security, privacy, de-duplication and flash memory storage as ones to watch this year.

These technologies are seen to offer new ways to help companies slash costs and boost operational efficiencies. Their appeal is clear, considering that companies emerging from the financial doldrums are still expected to be cautious with their IT spending, but yet face rapidly growing data requirements.

The worldwide data storage market slid into an overall decline in 2009 but improved in the third quarter. With IT purse strings expected to be loosened and companies ready to resume IT projects that were postponed due to the downturn, market watchers believe this year will be a bullish one for the storage industry.

'Businesses have been able to tide through the tough times with their current infrastructure, but it is now the time to look at the refreshment cycles for ageing products,' said Edwinder Singh, practice head, professional services, data centre solutions, Datacraft Asia.

The influx of new applications and increasing user requirements means that many companies' existing storage systems will not be able to cope for very long. Also, 'by not refreshing ageing products, one might actually incur higher maintenance costs', he noted.

Virtualisation and cloud computing

Virtualisation is most commonly referred to as technologies that let organisations carve a physical IT resource, such as a server, into multiple virtual IT ones. Doing so helps companies maximise the use levels of those resources. There is also storage virtualisation, which refers to technologies that allow different storage hardware to be combined as shared pools. Many storage vendors believe this platform is on the cusp of mainstream proliferation.

Cloud computing refers to a computing model that delivers applications over a network. Companies can run their payroll or 3D rendering programmes, for instance, over vendors' servers delivered via the Internet. They can also store and retrieve files over this cloud.

Francis Ling, director of business development at NCS, believes that many Singapore firms will be drawn to the cost-savings potential of such platforms this year.

'Most IT departments in Singapore will shift away from capital cost efficiencies to operational cost efficiencies,' he said. 'While capital budgets are loosening for many IT departments and the economy is apparently stabilising, enterprise data storage business in Singapore is not expected to fully recover from the most recent downturn soon.'

That means capital and operational efficiencies will continue to rule purchasing decisions this year.

A rebounding economy will free chief information officers (CIOs) from a hunker-down mentality to a more positive one focused on renewed investment in technology, said Scott Morris, Asean managing director at NetApp.

He believes that CIOs this year will focus their investment on IT innovations 'that align companies with best practices for the business overall, such as green computing, unified management and anytime-anywhere access' - with virtualisation a key technology to underpin such initiaitives.

But while virtualisation and cloud computing can help firms overcome data management challenges, CIOs will need to be aware of the quirks that come with the shared nature and openness of both platforms, he said.

For one thing, when allowing multitudes of users and applications to share the same storage platform, companies may want to consider prioritising some storage workloads over others to deliver better service to higher value tenants.

For another thing, having a shared storage platform means companies can no longer mandate rigid planned downtime periods. They must instead perform maintenance activities transparently.

They should also worry about security. 'IT organisations need to be certain that applications, data and customers are securely isolated in an infrastructure in which servers, networks and storage are all shared resources,' Mr Morris said.

De-duplicate and flash memory

Datacraft's Mr Singh believes that de-duplication, a budding storage technology, will be a hit with many companies this year. 'This technology can provide an immediate return on investments. Also, such solutions typically pay off for themselves within a year,' he said.

De-duplication alleviates the common problem of backing up multiple sets of the same data, which can cause companies to spend dramatically more than they need on storage and archival systems. For instance, a company's e-mail server typically contains multiple copies of the same e-mail attachments, created when employees re-send these attachments to other parties within the organisation.

De-duplication removes such duplicate and redundant information, and companies can slash their storage needs by over 50 per cent with this technology, said Mr Singh.

Companies typically create back-up copies of their data in a dedicated server. Vendors today offer de-duplication solutions and appliances that perform their tasks at where the back-up server is. This is called target deduplication, a segment that 'will be big in 2010 for a variety of reasons, starting with the fact that it is the right technology for a lot of customers in Singapore,' said NCS' Mr Ling. A key benefit of this is that it allows customers to continue using their existing back-up software.

Another type of de-duplication, called source de-duplication, is applied further upstream at the client-end - where a back-up software sends only unique data to the back-up server. This is particularly useful for bandwidth-constrained environments, such as a remote office or for a mobile workforce. Mr Ling said he is also seeing 'a lot of growth' in this product segment.

Choo Hock Leong, sales director at Seagate Technology, believes that solid state drives, which are based on flash memory, will continue to gain ground with businesses this year. Seagate, the world's largest hard disk drive maker, last year joined this burgeoning sector with its first-ever flash-based drive.

With prices of flash memory continuing to fall, many believe this technology is now cheap enough for use by enterprises, where the solid state drives' high speed will prove very handy. According to research firm IDC, the market for solid state drives in the enterprise segment is set to reach US$1 billion this year.

'Solid state drives complement hard drives and have a vital role to play in delivering high performance for certain enterprise applications. Some applications, such as database indexing, require ultra-fast access to data in which solid state drives are a good fit,' Mr Choo said.

'Other types of applications require access to large amounts of data, with access times being less critical. In this case, hard drives, with their larger capacity capabilities, are a better fit,' he said.