I Don't Do Predictions

By Dipesh Patel, Senior Product Marketing Manager, CommVault

Well folks, I have to say 2009 went by pretty darn quick! It was definitely an exciting start for me as I jumped in with both feet on data deduplication. And it's always nice to have some strong technology to back you up (thank you developers!). But as we began 2010, someone suggested that I do a 2010 Predictions List.

I'll take a pass on that for this year at least. First of all, I think there are plenty of folks out there who'll cast their gaze into the crystal ball faster than you can say F-Y-I. So instead, I looked around and thought it would be more interesting to review the "deep thoughts" from some of the respected pundits in the industry. They are (in no particular order):

• Steve Duplessie of Enterprise Strategy Group, who reviewed his thoughts on "Where Is the IT Spending Going to Happen in 2010?";
• Curtis Preston, a frequent contributor to many industry articles and seen at many a storage event; and
• Chuck Hollis from a little company outside of Beantown , gazing into his very own "Storage Crystal Ball".

Steve provided a nice overview of what he sees as good, bad and just plain interesting. Curtis gives us a nice moment to stop and reflect on the events and changes of 2009. Chuck gave us a somewhat extensive peek at where he sees the world going and EMC's place within that context.

Steve bases his insights on ESG's annual IT spending survey, which reflects a cautious optimism and an increase in IT spending on select areas, especially those like Compliance and BI, where customers are choosing to spend "strategically". He also says there will be big increases in spending on Virtualization, Security and Storage. And in my opinion, spending on storage increasingly means figuring out where deduplication fits in that picture. It's interesting to note that 2 of the top 4 IT priorities (server virtualization, and improving data backup/recovery) are prime drivers for the adoption of deduplication across enterprise of all sizes today. As for cloud, he's not quite down with it (just yet), but is hopeful given how long it took other technologies, like virtualization, to go "mass market".

Curtis applauds the birth of a few open-source backup products as well as improvements to existing products from a couple of other major vendors. But, he remains underwhelmed with the deduplication results of Tivoli. In our experience, most dedupe vendors end up with about the same amount of deduped data on disk, within a few percentage points at least. But Tivoli might be the exception here. Honestly, we don't have a definitive opinion either way and would love to hear from those of you out there running Tivoli 6.1 with dedupe. Curtis also focuses on the "cloud" but on the cases of two embarrassing failures, one related to T-Mobile Sidekick (sorry Paris we can't find your photos, but maybe someone somewhere may still have a copy). The other related to Carbonite's loss of data from 7,500 customers.

Finally, there's Chuck. There are a lot of words there. Don't get me wrong, he gets some pretty interesting points across. A vision of the world moving to very minimal use of tape, a reliance on a hybrid SSD/SATA model that uses their FAST technology to dynamically move data based on its requirements and combining that with technologies like compression, deduplication, and dynamic spin-down. What I really found interesting was the sheer number of EMC products he mentioned. These include: EFDs, FAST, V-Max, CLARiiON, Celerra, Rainfinity, Avamar, Data Domain, RecoverPoint, Centera, all EMC arrays [just in case we missed any], Data Protection Manager, Networker, Atmos, SourceOne, Kazeon, RSA DLP.

They have a big portfolio, and I bet they have an army of people that you'll need to hire to make all those pieces work together. Comprehensive? Yes. Complex? Yes. Costly? You betcha.

So what does this all mean for the rest of us in 2010?

Well, first of all I think storage will continue to evolve and deliver even more value to customers. Second, deduplication will continue to march on and truly become mainstream in practice as well as in planning for future upgrades. Third, minimizing risk, and maximizing ROI will become much more important this year as opposed to the single-minded focus on cost containment that dominated 2009.

But all I can say for sure is that 2010 is going to be one heck of an interesting year.

What about you? What kinds of project and initiatives are you excited about for 2010? We'd love to hear from you!

SOURCE: CommVault Systems