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Regulation drives storage complexity – Yankee Group

Simple stuff out

Storage infrastructures are about to get a whole lot more complex, according to a report from the Yankee Group. It fingers regulatory and compliance pressures as the main drivers behind the adoption of a multi-layered approach to storage, with different types of storage offering different cost per GB, access speed, quality of service, and so on.

"Customers need to make more informed decisions about storage systems in 2003. Gone are the days of just buying a dumb storage array or feature-slim NAS system for your data," says Jamie Gruener, the group's senior analyst for enterprise computing & networking.

He expects the main beneficiaries to be those companies selling content storage technology, as this provides the ability to store and access data as fixed content, something that is increasingly being demanded by regulators.

In future, storage implementations will need to take account of application requirements and other factors such as data quality of service, says Gruener. This means evaluating applications and their data to figure out the best type of storage for their needs.

The ongoing shift to networked storage will help, Gruener adds, but is highly dependent on the industry adhering to standards and providing better pricing and ease of use. He says IP storage will help here and will grow its share of the market, but predicts that Fibre Channel will remain the mainstay of the storage networking for at least the next five years. ®

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