Amateur Punditry!!

Now every array appears to have thin provisioning either today or at least roadmapped for delivery within the next year, I am wondering what the next ubiquitous feature or trend in storage will be. Dedupe appears to be obvious one, certainly within NAS storage; Dedupe is going to work well in alot of NAS environments and if you look at most NAS heads, they probably have spare CPU cycles to enable this. I'm sure we will see offerings from all of the major players and NetApp is already there. Are we going to see it across the piece and for SAN attached storage, not sure at the moment?

The next thing I am expecting to see (with one exception) is the move across the board to a chunk/extent based architecture; it enables wide-striping and thin-provisioning in most of the more traditionally architected arrays. I can see 3Par's 'micro-raid' type architecture becoming popular as well. The exception will be NetApp; they will stick with the WAFL architecture and will continue to be the odd-bods. As the chunk/extent based architecture becomes more prevalent and more understood, I can see it leading to

1) Automated Storage Tiering; with chunks being moved between different storage medium automagically. This will allow SSDs to be utilised economically, you only need to look at the Compellent architecture to see what might come. Compellent might become the next 3Par in that they help to define a technology and become the flag-wavers; they'll have to be carefull that as flag-wavers they don't get squished by everyone charging to the flag.

2) SAN DeDupe; DeDupe will be done at the chunk level, this means getting the chunk size correct is going to be crucial. But this will take a bit longer to appear I suspect.

I'm also expecting to see more RAIN architectures built round commodity hardware; more than just storage-related workloads will be built into the nodes e.g. transcoding in the digital media space.

Lastly I think Xiotech and Atrato are going to be interesting companies to watch; similar concepts and just made for chunk-based architectures. Someone will pick them up in the next year or so.

Anyway, just some thoughts from user-land!