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File data to balloon sixfold by 2012

Petabyte pandemonium

The Enterprise Strategy Group is forcasting a sixfold growth in file archive capacity, from a little over 10,000PB in 2008 to 62,000PB in 2012.

An ESG survey, asked respondents what they considered important when buying network-attached storage (NAS) systems.

The top attribute was power and cooling-efficiency, with 75 percent saying it was either essential (34 per cent), meaning they would not buy a system without it, or a strong preference.

This was followed by space efficiency at 76 per cent but with a smaller proportion (31 per cent) thinking it essential. Data reduction, meaning deduplication and compression, was also at 76 percent with 30 per cent rating it essential.

Multiple drive support in a system was rated essential or strongly preferred by 75 per cent, and multiple access protocol support rated at 73 per cent. Remote replication and thin provisioning came in at 75 per cent and 74 per cent respectively, and a global namespace at 72 percent, followed by read-write snapshots at 71 per cent.

Solid state drive (SSD) support was thought to be essential by 12 per cent of respondents and a strong preference by 46 per cent.

This is good news for NAS suppliers such as BlueArc, EMC (Celerra), NetApp and others, also archival product manufacturers, such as Mimosa, EMC's Documentum, and, in the cloud. Mimecast. Perhaps file virtualisation products, such as those from F5, could also receive a sales boost.

Isilon, a supplier of clustered, scale-out NAS products, has its whole product line based on the idea that file data is growing faster than block data. Scale-out NAS is used in the high-performance computing and rich media industries but has not gained a substantial presence in the general enterprise market.

The ESG anyalysts think scale-out NAS needs to get deduplication and better IOPS performance if this is to happen.

In general, this rising file archive data tide should lift all the different NAS boats. ®

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