As we say goodbye to another exciting year in the storage industry, we begin to set our sights on the future and what lies ahead.  While demand for data storage technologies continues to be strong and preparing for managing and effectively utilizing Big Data prevails in many organizations’ new initiative investigation; several technology drivers will directly and immediately impact the storage industry as we head into the New Year. Here’s a look at my predictions for 2012:

Tape is Here to Stay

Tape will continue its resurgence, driven in part by the increasing adoption of tape to offload spinning disk storage. Tape will be used as primary storage file storage for long-term data retention and will remain the most cost-effective enterprise storage media for Big Data and Cloud Storage environments.

Explosive Data Growth Continues

Data growth will continue unabated and more organizations will approach Petabyte capacities and seek new ways to manage, index and access their vast data volumes utilizing active archives.  In fact, the amount of data we manage today will seem insignificant five years from now.

More Cloud Storage Adoption

Cloud storage will increase in adoption with a heightened emphasis on data accessibility and security.

Big Data is Big Driver

Big Data will drive the movement toward massive library repositories that meet both capacity and economic requirements of massive data volumes and large data files. Much of the focus in 2011 on Big Data has been on analytics and how to derive value from this mass of data.  In 2012, we will start to hear more about how to retain and store this data.

Purpose-built SSD Systems Gain Steam

SSD will make further storage inroads and begin taking market share, albeit small, from enterprise disk. Purpose-built SSD systems will gain traction and compete with traditional disk systems that have added SSDs into existing designs.

Hardware-based Data Integrity Verification Required

Hardware-based data integrity verification will become a requirement for ‘best practice’ archive storage.

Spotlight on RAID Rebuild Times

Rebuild times for traditional RAID implementations will become a larger issue as drive capacities continue to grow and organizations keep adding spindles to their environments.

Shift in Traditional Backup Practices

Traditional backup practices will continue to shift.  Data centers will increasingly move to online, file-based archives for long-term data retention instead of utilizing offline backups in proprietary formats.

A recent Spectra Logic announcement caused quite a stir within the storage industry, from positive analyst and media feedback to customers asking about implementing it. Why the excitement? More organizations are retaining ever-expanding volumes of data and storing it for ever-increasing periods of time to meet their business and compliance objectives. And they want to know without a doubt their data will be there when needed.  Spectra’s BlueScale® Data Integrity Verification provides organizations the utmost confidence their backup and archive data will be readily available when needed, regardless of how long it has been stored. Spectra’s offering is “data archive insurance”, the first of its kind in the market, unmatched in both its comprehensiveness and its flexibility.  And, importantly, it is available across our entire line of T-Series tape libraries at no additional cost to users.  

How did we get here? Customer satisfaction and promoting confidence in backup and archive data has always been at the forefront of everything we do at Spectra. We have been advancing media integrity and data integrity capabilities in our libraries for many years. And our recently announced Data Integrity Verification is the pinnacle of data integrity validation. It builds on our Media Lifecycle Management (MLM), the initial data integrity capabilities we introduced several years ago, and our subsequent data integrity enhancements. MLM checks more than 30 health points on individual cartridges and proactively notifies the administrator when it is time to retire tape media and replace them with new tapes, mitigating data corruption and loss. Data Integrity Verification is compatible with any media from any LTO supplier, and it gives customers the flexibility to use either dedicated or shared library resources to verify data, which translates into faster, more efficient verification checks. Better yet, it seamlessly integrates into existing environments and operates as a background library-managed process with no impact to application software configurations.  

How does Spectra's Data Integrity Verification work? It proactively performs three levels of fully automated validation:

• PreScan - Checks newly imported tapes to ensure they are ready to use: for example, in good health, generationally compatible and not write-protected.
   
• QuickScan - Quickly and immediately verifies the backup and archive data was successfully written to tape with a rapid single pass from the beginning of the tape to the end of the first track.  Along with PostScan, rapid or gradual media degradation is tracked in the libraryand reported to users.
   
• PostScan - Automatically verifies the physical tape cartridge and the integrity of all of the data stored upon it for the duration the data is retained. As with PreScan and QuickScan, the PostScan process is performed by the library and is independent of the backup application normally used to read and write data to the tape.

The buzz surrounding our recent announcement tells us we're not the only ones taking another look at tape. “Customers will be thrilled that their system will upgraded to take advantage of Data Integrity Verification’s features at no cost,” said David Hill, principal, Mesabi Group. “Most users will run both Spectra’s PreScan and QuickScan to validate that the tape is in good condition and that data has been properly written to and can be read back from tape. QuickScan’s single pass data verification check takes less than one minute to complete, an impressive time frame. The free upgrade is a fantastic customer-friendly move by Spectra Logic, which is one of the few remaining vendors with a strong tape offering.”

DIV is just one example of how tape advancements are securing tape’s growing role in the data center – from data archiving to cloud storage.  See a recent blog post from Storage Switzerland analyst George Crump. “A funny thing happened to tape on the way to its funeral. It had the audacity to not cooperate with the disk vendors and die. In fact, tape storage has recently shown more than just signs of life, it’s showing signs of growth. The question about tape has changed from “how long will it be around?” to “how else can we leverage it?” What is causing this change? It’s the same thing that saved Apple, innovation.”

And the industry is watching. Case in point, this week, more than ten vendors that you may typically consider foes are collaborating at Tape Summit 2011 (Learn more at www.tapeisnotdeadyet.com).   Like Data Integrity Verification, this event is a first of its kind, and is designed to bring the major industry players together to report on the state of tape and its future. Tape Summit will be held April 13-15 in Las Vegas. Follow the event on Twitter: hashtag, #tapesummit.

2011 is an exciting time for tape and Spectra is leading tape technology’s innovations while helping customers understand the potential of these extremely efficient, effective storage solutions.

The Active Archive Alliance formation was just announced last week. I wanted to take the opportunity to tell you how the concept originated, evolved and solidified, and why Spectra Logic is participating as a founding member.