Gartner Wants Storage Teams At Every CompanyGartner Wants Storage Teams At Every Company

Analysts at Gartner's Planet Storage in Las Vegas advised attendees Monday to prepare for increased demand for the next five years. Demand had a chance to slow, but according to John Monroe, as everything becomes digitized, capacity demands grow exponentially.

In concluding remarks, Monroe told the crowd to prepare for a billion-node network in 2008 and the inescapable growth of digitized information. He also thinks storage hardware inside the systems won't change much, with hard disks dominating, while optical and tape media continue to play a role in archiving. Bob Passmore emphasized the importance of dedicated teams to manage storage infrastructure; he pleaded with attendees to focus more on recovery instead of dedicating their efforts to improved backup that might not get better anyway. And he said the next five years will be a time for everyone to investigate low-cost storage products that can increasingly do the job inside and outside the data center.

Monroe says storage customers shouldn't have to worry about hard-disk replacements for the next five years. "Optical storage like holographic technology is the storage of the future, and it always will be," he said. "And the quest for solid-state disk technology that would scale goes on, but it continues to cost way too much."

Passmore talked about the availability of low-cost mirroring systems but was most concerned with the way companies administer their storage, calling for dedicated teams. "Too many clients use server administrators and database administrators on a part-time basis to manage the storage," he said. "On a storage network, a mistake by one of these part-time people on his piece of the infrastructure could shut the whole network down."