Storage Outlook: Cloudy, No Swimming

Earlier this month I sat down with Deepak Mohan, senior VP of Symantec's Information Management Group, and Anil Chakravarthy, senior VP of Symantec's Storage and Availability Management Group, to discuss the growth of digital information and topics that InformationWeek Analytics will be covering in the second half of the year.Some headlines: Mohan estimates that up to 70% of the data enterprises store is duplicative. "We are saving a lot of junk," he said. "And the important items we often keep, we keep for far too long because we don't know how to organize and separate it. And so we keep everything. Forever." (Disk may be cheap, but lawyers aren't.)

Both expect desktop virtualization will make things worse as storage moves from end user devices to the data center and we start saving multiple copies of desktop images. (Sure, IT plans to strictly limit the number of virtual desktops available, but be honest. Do you really believe that's going to happen?)

SAN buildouts are slowing as CIOs focus on optimizing what they already own, and both see automated tiering and deduplication becoming features with storage systems as opposed to standalone appliances. Clustering for DR is still mostly active/passive, though they're seeing more customers pilot load balancing and handling of demand spikes on DR systems, something virtualization can help with, as we've discussed. And, storage optimization will increasingly let IT escape vendor lock-in via multipathing and a single interface that will make the underlying hardware transparent to apps. (Can we get an amen to that.)

Nothing earth shattering perhaps, but all moves in the right direction. That's important, because what we're doing now isn't working.

"In a survey of Symantec NetBackup customers, for example, one organization had more than 300,000 tapes onsite and 500,000 tapes offsite," said Mohan. "Another demolished the employee swimming pool to use the space to store more tapes."

That couldn't have helped the CIO's popularity.

Chakravarthy estimates that 85% of data is unstructured, another thorn in IT's side, and outlined a set of four principles to help rein in growth.