Trends in Information Storage and Management

Everyday organizations are churning out a huge amount of information, storing an

d managing which is becoming nothing less than a challenge. An interaction with
Alok Shrivastava, Senior Director, EMC Education Services and Manoj Chugh, Presi
dent ? India and SAARC, EMC Data Storage Systems(India), brought out how this ar
ea of? Information Storage and Management is evolving.
The evolution
Most people who are not familiar with the information storage technology closely
, have a perception which is very simplistic of the technology. They believe tha
t it is all about a bunch of disks on which your data is stored. But over the ye
ars, technology has become extremely sophisticated evolving into various segmen
ts, making it impossible for one person to manage different jobs to be accompli
shed across these different segments. IDC says that in the next 4 years, the siz
e of information is going to experience an overall growth of about 5 times. Ever
ything else will evolve and will be upgraded and replaced but at the end of the
day , information that organizations or individuals create cannot be upgraded. I
t has to be carried forward until it has value.
Earlier information was stored in disk drives, which are attached as appendages
to computing platforms. With the huge growth of information, over a period of t
ime it, became impossible to store all this information within the computer syst
ems. Then arose the need to store data on network storage which are storage de
vices outside the computers and which got connected to the computer over a netwo
rk, where a number of computing platforms could then share this storage device.
Thus Network storage came into vogue and today most organizations because of the
huge growth in terms of information assets, deployed Network Storage devices.
This means that the way organizations have to now manage information and design
their information infrastructure strategy has become far different from the w
ay it was done earlier.
Trends in information storage and management
In the past, it was primarily the corporate sector that created information. Bu
t over the last 6-7 years, we have started seeing a big shift where more info is
created by individuals than by corporates. Though majority of data is being c
reated by individuals ? like emails to videos to text messages, etc ? managemen
t of this information is still majorly done by corporation. For example, if we u
pload a video on Youtube, we are actually placing it on someone else's server. T
his means that Youtube has to manage this information in a way that it is availa
ble to millions of people.
The biggest challenge that an organization faces nowadays is managing the growin
g information. Some of the technologies which are helping us achieve this are -
* Virtualization : This technology is helping us in reducing complexities an
d enabling cost cutting.
* Cloud computing : This is enabling hiding of the complexity of the apps an
d business processes from the underlying hardware.
* Data deduplication: A compelling technology which is helping in making sur
e that similar info doesn't get stored multiple number of times. It ensures th
at one piece of info is stored very effectively in a way that it is optimally ma
de available. For example : A 10 terabyte can be de-duplicated to 1 or 2 terabyt
e.
* Automation : With the huge growth of info it is becoming very difficult to
manage the infrastructure itself. Information is going to grow 4 to 5 times in
the next few years, but organizations cannot employ 5 times the number of peop
le. Neither can the IT budget be increased by 5 times. So how to automate this
process and how to optimize it would be the next big questions that the organiza
tions will be ponder.
 Need for Information Storage and Management professionals
The academia in Computer Science and Electronics has been teaching computer arch
itecture, operating systems and data bases but the 4th leg of the stool which is
information management is missing. There is a huge gap in terms of talent pool
and the requirement of the industry of professionals who could manage informat
ion. Multiple areas of specializations have evolved in this segment.
Now in the area of information storage and management we are looking at segment
s like architecture of system itself; connecting the systems to each other or t
he servers etc, which is where Storage Area Networking, NAS, Fibre Channel Over
Ethernet (FCOE is coming up in a big way and we expect it to be a trend changer
in the next few years.) etc come in. Then there is the challenge of keeping th
e data up and running all the time ? which is called as business continuity. Thi
s involves technology that helps not only in protecting the data but ensuring
its availability 24*7. Then there are technology focusing on backup recovery, ar
chiving, data de-duplication etc. Other technologies are in the areas of storage
virtualization and proactive information management.
Industry Trend
A positive trend that is being observed across the industries in the last 4 year
s is that companies are dedicating more and more staff to the function of inform
ation storage and management. Earlier there was not even a storage management gr
oup. It used to be part of some other group like Operating Systems Management .
Even job titles in the area of storage management were not standard. But now s
pecialization are emerging and job titles in this area are emerging - like stora
ge admin, systems admin, backup, recovery officials, operations managers, archit
ects etc. Professionals with expertise in this domain are required but there is
great shortage of skilled pros, which is a opening up great job opportunities. E
ven people who are in the industry for more than a decade are now realizing that
there is a significant gap in their knowledge too.