With less than two weeks left to go until 2011, it’s time for publications to roll out their predictions for the coming year. Storage Magazine has put together a list of what its editors and experts will be the hottest technologies in storage in the coming year. Coming in at #1 is automated storage tiering in its debut on the hot technology annual list, ahead of cloud storage services, primary storage de-dupe and others. Why is tiering so hot? It’s all about the Flash and intelligent use of it:
“It was very difficult to be able to afford enough SSD if you were purely going to use it as a static storage device,” noted Mark Peters, a senior analyst at Milford, Mass.-based Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). “Now that people will be able to combine tiering with a smaller amount of SSD, I think the two go hand in glove.”
The article goes on to give out sage advice on how to choose a tiering solution and separate hype from reality:
Product differentiators include the level of granularity at which the data moves between tiers, the degree of automation and the extent to which users can define policies.
Wait a minute – that criteria seems very, very familiar to us, it’s just missing the part about the ability to work in a heterogeneous environment.
At any rate, we’re glad that Storage Magazine recognizes how important dynamic storage tiering is in building out high performance, cost effective storage networks – we couldn’t agree more. Here’s to 2011!
