The data center has become the heart and soul of a company. It provides far more than just the technology aspect of a business. But the average data center has grown extremely complex. New technologies, fast growth, acquisitions, the online data explosion, and increased security concerns have driven complexity up and utilization rates down. In the recent years there have been an increase number of threats like terrorist attacks, statewide power outages, and the hurricane and tornado season that have only exacerbated the challenges facing data centers.

While priorities may change over time, one remains constant: the need to do more with less. This paper addresses eight key trends and challenges that impact data centers now and will impact them into the future: connectivity, tiered storage management, thin provisioning, storage system resiliency, application availability, unified storage, security, and integrated data management.

According to industry analyst Meta Group, organizations that have the most revenue and are most heavily dependent on online systems, have the highest potential loss of revenue (up to $2 million per hour, or $500 per employee) from application and network outages. The storage trends, challenges, and solutions outlined in this paper will help data center managers to plan and adapt their storage resources and policies.

Connectivity
Based on industry data from Gartner Group, growth for Fibre Channel (FC) slows, but it will still remain the dominant storage network technology for at least the next five years, even though Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) over Ethernet will restrain its growth. Continued backward compatibility and the increase in speed (4Gb, 8Gb) continue to characterize FC technology for the data center.

Ethernet-based iSCSI represents the biggest challenge to FC dominance and 10GbE helps to narrow the gap. InfiniBand (IBA) offers a low-cost switching technology, but it is not a mature storage networking technology and only a few vendors offer native IBA storage. Serial-attached SCSI (SAS) offers a low-cost alternative to FC for lowto-midrange direct-attached storage, server/storage (DAS) cluster environments, and, potentially in the future, small SANs, but will not impact FC in the data center.