I just downloaded the latest Storage Magazine from TechTarget, for which I write a column. It is worth a read — the magazine, that is. You decide whether you want to read my words.
I guess I would have to say that the meme of the moment is myths. I wrote about the Mayan Apocalypse myth — you know the one, where the world ends in December. The story is based on a misreading, possibly ideologically driven, of ancient language carvings at one of the Pre-Columbian cities-now-tourist attractions in the Yucatan. Scientists say the misinterpretation of the date of the galactic reset places doomsday this year rather than many octillion years, into the future. Small math error.
I use it as a springboard to discuss a real challenge: the storage capacity demand growth curve, which Gartner and IDC are placing at between 300 and 650% between now and 2014 in shops with server virtualization. (It is a much less frightening 30 to 40% in non server-virtualized shops.) The bad news is that we can almost double the numbers when you consider that trends show how we are using half of the disk we deploy to back up the other half, rather than using tape strategically or cleaning out the dupes and dreck data at all.
Unlike the Mayan polar shift, this is a slow motion and very preventable (budgetary) apocalypse. But most firms seem to be drinking the Kool-Aide of the deduplication and compression peddlers, thinking that such short term and expensive capacity demand reduction schemes will do anything more than delay the inevitable. I suppose it will take a catastrophic data loss at some very visible brand name company before we start to get real about capacity utilization efficiency (as opposed to capacity allocation efficiency) and data management.
Furthering the myth meme, the close of the book this month is a survey that seems to have been prompted by the column I wrote a couple of issues back. I voiced my suspicions, based on public statements of disk drive manufacturers made to shareholders late last year and early this year, that the purported disk drive shortage was a myth. Turns out, based on the survey that Storage Magazine runs on its last pages, that 58% of respondents believe that disk shortages are either a flat out prevarication or are at least being used to justify higher prices. I feel so validated.
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