The dawning of the 2007 storage industry trend forecast

2006 storage industry in the low-end market to maintain a stable growth momentum, the government, energy, education, medical and other industry users, with a strong demand for information construction has become one of the reasons for the steady development of low-end market. In addition, with the comprehensive implementation of the computer file management system in China, in the 2007, the two-flourishing environment will be quickly formed, the manufacturers mergers and acquisitions and high-end product cost reduction will bring the dawn of the storage industry. On the storage software side, Microsoft Windows Storage Server2003 R2 and Symantec backupexcel11d are all worth looking forward to.

The inverse trend of size and capacity is obvious

The 2007 HDD market will be missing the name of ' Tuo ', but Seagate, Western data, Hitachi, Toshiba, Samsung, which are still strong and vibrant, deserve our anticipation. Looking back 2006, the disk market has started to tilt to a 2.5-inch hard drive. And we expect 2007 "Small size" disk market competition will be a more intense year, vertical records and other emerging technologies will shine. According to IDC data, the 2.5-inch HDD market will continue to grow significantly in the next few years, 2005 year 2010, the annual compound growth rate of 2.5-inch products (CAGR) will reach 22%, from 2006 's 118 million to 2010 's 224 million.

As the popularity of multimedia mobile devices, handheld devices (such as mobile phones) on the local storage capacity of the rapid increase in demand, which also forced the hard drive manufacturers to adopt new storage technology to develop the product as a response. At CES 2006, for example, several micro-hard disk manufacturers said they would launch a larger-capacity product in 2007 to meet customers ' needs. At the same time, due to the rapid reduction of the cost of 3.5-inch hard disk, the single disk capacity will enter the "T era" immediately. Experts predict that the 2007 storage market also has a large acquisition and consolidation of space, especially in the desktop hard disk market, the disappearance of strong swallow weak will continue to occur.

As a new storage interface technology, SAS not only began to enter the popularity phase in 2006, but also was considered as the alternative to parallel SCSI because of its fibre Channel function. SAS flexibility and compatibility (which is compatible with SATA) guarantees that the user's previous investments are not wasted. In terms of scalability, up to 16,384 devices with superior performance, as well as effective heat dissipation in high-density environments, will be the preferred storage medium for enterprise and individual users in the 2007.

1.8-inch hard drive won't die

Since the invention of the world's first tape drive (IBM 726), tape technology has evolved for half a century today. It should be a miracle that more and more innovative technologies and products are starting to hit tape technology and have undergone countless changes that have not been replaced and are still alive. From the perspective of the development of tape library products, in addition to its larger capacity and faster access in 2007 years, the tape library's hybrid drive features, virtual partitions, data encryption protection, intelligent management, and Dobby technology will be more suitable for applications in networked storage environments and remain a prominent member of networked storage.

The price of tape drives and tapes is fully acceptable from the actual needs of educational users. As a result, many primary and secondary schools will probably become the first users of low-end tape drives in 2007. In the selection of mixed tape drives, the current market mainstream tape drive products, such as LTO, SDLT/DLT, plus ait/sait and Stk T9840 and T9940 products, not only a wide range of prices have made them fully accessible to primary and secondary schools. and county-level information centers or colleges and universities can choose high-end tape drives and connectivity technologies (optical fiber, SCSI, iSCSI, etc.) according to the important level of their application systems.

Encrypted backups are still a problem for many database administrators because of the fact that encrypted backups take more time to make. After IBM launched the TS51120, there will be more choices in the tape encryption market in 2007, with further integration of security and high-speed. Virtual Tape library partitions and some of the data's special protection methods (worm capabilities) meet the specific needs of some confidential data resources.

8GB FC Heat is not enough

Although 8G FC products will be available before the end of 2007, but because of the high cost, distance constraints and the lack of clear IP requirements, and other factors, people's expectations are not very high, education users due to funds and other factors, temporarily will not join the storage white-hot disputes. FC Link technology can also connect the blade (Edge) host and storage device in addition to the interface between storage device, exchanger and server. At the same time, FATA has been available for two years, Fata drives provide an FC interface for ATA drives, and FC drives and FATA drives can coexist in a single system, like SAS and SATA, which add new partners to 2G, 4GFC storage.

Since 2006, 4G FC storage has gradually formed a climate, switch manufacturers and storage vendors of 4G FC products have surfaced, with Brocade and other international well-known companies, 4G storage in 2007 will knock open the door to the education industry, the storage product needs of the "big door."

In contrast to FC, iSCSI is set to March forward in 2007. Because the iSCSI protocol is the architecture on top of the TCP/IP protocol and its upper layer is connected to SCSI media, users can create an actual SAN network anywhere from a standard Ethernet cable without requiring a dedicated Fibre Channel network to transfer data between the server and the storage device. iSCSI makes remote mirroring and backup possible because of the lack of fibre channel distance limitations and the use of standard TCP/IP protocols, which will erode the market share of FC products after 2007.

Archived Products Mature Gradually

ILM (Information lifecycle Management) management concept points out that the application value of information data in different lifecycle is not the same. The value of information will decrease with time, which leads the education industry to go astray in the construction of the resource bank. If we automatically move the location of the data according to the different values of the information, it will help to save the cost of purchasing expensive storage equipment for a large number of digital data.

The hype of ILM concepts to more realistic data archiving products and solutions is a process that leads users from cognition to enjoyment. The most popular event of the 2006 was the "Sarbanes-oxley Act", which made many data archiving products known to users, such as the Hitachi data archiving software based on CommVault Technology, Symantec Enterprise Vault, Ilumin's Assentor archive and network engine's mailbase, and the application server product is a scheme for bundling hardware such as archiving software with storage devices and gateways, such as EMC Centera with HP Riss(reference information Storage system) and so on. Most of the data archiving software supports mixed media format, which can realize the automation of the stored procedure and fast data retrieval, which can realize the disaster recovery of information system and reduce the cost of management. Expected in 2007. The concept of ILM will be valued by more educational and scientific institutions, and as the vendor storage solution Matures, we also see many applications stored in indexing technology that can bring good luck to educational resource development, such as content addressed storage (CAS) technology and instant indexing technology (real-time index).