Andrew Martin, VP of APAC

For much of 2009, deduplication was the “buzz” technology in storage. We started seeing major adoption of deduplication across different business sectors and companies of varying sizes, from large enterprises down to SMEs, adopt the technology. In addition, we saw a move from deduplication specialist companies dominating the space to traditional storage and software companies (BakBone included) coming to market with their own deduplication offerings. Finally, we saw the soap-opera-like battle of two industry giants slugging it out to take control as the leading deduplication specialist, Data Domain.

So what’s going to be the storage buzz technology of 2010?

Unfortunately, I don’t see anything on the horizon about to explode into every IT department. I stand to be proved wrong, but I do not see a technology taking us by storm in 2010 in the way deduplication did last year.

Cloud storage is growing with many vendors aiming to get on the bandwagon, form alliances and drive IT departments toward their vision of how cloud should be adopted. However, I have spoken to many people about cloud storage: IT directors, government departments, analysts, journalists and systems integrators, and whilst cloud is becoming increasingly relevant, it seems that adoption of cloud based will still be steady with corporate companies, particularly experimenting with different providers to find out what, if anything, works for them.

Whilst cloud is going to continue to grow, my educated guess is that it won’t be the must-have storage technology of 2010.

I have seen one technology making a comeback – archiving. However, I don’t think we can refer to archiving as  something new; in fact, it is one of the oldest storage technologies around with HSM-type products being popular in the height of the mainframe days.

However, across Asia and beyond, many companies are expressing a renewed interest in spending money on archive and HSM-type products. This is not only for e-mail but also for applications like SharePoint and even for file-system data. In addition, we are seeing numerous startup companies come to market with new archive products. It is interesting to see startups cropping up in such an old arm of storage technology. However, these new companies are working on the next generation of archive technology. Products that understand and take advantage of server and storage virtualisation, that can classify data in many different ways and even build a repository of archived data that can be used for analysis by other applications. BakBone recently released NetVault: Archive in Europe (a “next-generation archive product”), and it has been fascinating to see the level of demand for us to launch this product in Asia.

For me, I wonder what the natural progression from archiving might be. I have wondered if there ever might be demand for a vendor to build a platform that can intelligently delete data; not secure deletion, there are many light utilities available that securely delete data. My vision is of a technology that can identify data based on strong preset criteria that can be permanently deleted without impacting compliance or inadvertently removing required/useful data.

We are always reluctant to simply delete data; however we know two things for a fact:

1 – The rate of data growth causes significant data management problems.

2 – We store and protect large volumes of data that we do not need and will never use again.

Deleting data sends a chill down the spine of most IT administrators and is something we just don’t do. The risk of deleting something critical outweighs the potential benefit of getting rid of the waste.

However, if intelligent file systems ever become a reality, then maybe a product that allows data to automatically be “thrown” into the waste bin could be in our future.