“The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.” -William Gibson
[This is my fourth and final excerpt from my The Future of Backup whitepaper. Download the full whitepaper for instant gratification.]
Based on pricing and technology trends, there are several predictions that today appear to have a high probability of occurring in the next few years:
- Tape will continue its long downward march into irrelevance.
- SSD (Solid State Disk) drives will become increasingly viable in terms of commonly used primary storage – the pricing per terabyte will rapidly decrease. There will also continue to be a large gap with respect to the price per terabyte between SSD and large commodity drives. Backup data will exist primarily on large commodity drives.
- Deduplication will be difficult to achieve on primary storage, but inroads will be made by major storage vendors to accelerate the gap between processor/memory price/performance versus disk price/performance.
- Virtualization “sprawl and stall” will prove a difficult problem to overcome. 100 percent virtualized environments will continue to be rare, and operating system, application, and hypervisor heterogeneity will continue to be a major factor to consider when selecting backup.
- SAN and NAS vendors will continue to lower their prices but DAS (Direct Attached Storage) will continue to offer a significant advantage in terms of price and price/performance.
- Cloud-based backup vendors will increasingly take advantage of some form of on-premise appliance as the gap between on-premise performance and off-premise performance grows over time. This provides the advantages of protecting large amounts of data locally while offering rapid recovery combined with the disaster recovery capabilities of off-site cloud storage.
- Cloud-based vendors offering only metered public multiple tenant cloud-based disaster recovery services will find that their growth is limited by private single tenant cloud-based disaster recovery.
- There will be an increasing focus with respect to combining the idea of agile information with leaner staffing models in order to focus on a reduction in operational expenditure, resulting in a greater focus on all-in-one backup appliances.
- I believe that the future is based on a concept that is termed D2D2x, which stands for Disk-to-Disk-to-Any. D2D2x takes older models such as D2D2T (Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape) and combines it with rotational archiving via D2D2D (Disk-to-Disk-to-Disk), private single tenant cloud-based disaster recovery, and public multiple tenant cloud-based disaster recovery (D2D2C – Disk-to-Disk-to-Cloud).
