There is no shortage of innovation in the storage industry in 2005! In fact, it is now clear to close industry observers that we are on the cusp of an entirely new wave of data storage and data management innovation, extending into the foreseeable future. For example, in the past 12 months, we have seen several distinct new data storage product categories and technologies come to clear definition, all driven by strong entrepreneurial innovation from young companies.

The following are three major innovation categories that will have a significant impact on both data storage and enterprise IT over the coming years: Information Classifications and Management, Network File Management, Wide Area File Services.

We will take a brief look at each of these trends to understand the broad range of data storage innovation now underway.

Information Classifications and Management
For the past 24 months, storage vendors have been hyping the power of their Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) technologies as a means of creating intelligent data storage infrastructures that can save any piece of data, at any time, anywhere, all based on policies set by the administrator.

While the ILM vision was both exciting and powerful, the first wave of ILM solutions lacked the true intelligence to achieve these goals. Users could only move data around based on generalized policies, not “on the fly” and not with any truly useful automation. In short, users needed a way to get “inside the box” and inspect content itself. This is precisely the innovation gap that Information Classification and Management (ICM) solutions have stepped in to address.

ICM solutions do several things that no storage-centric data management solution has done before:

Once deployed, these software solutions proactively and automatically explore (“crawl”) stored data pools to index all content based on metadata and content attributes.

They allow administrators create programmable policy templates or lexicons to manage all stored content based on rules-based controls.
They provide an easy to use search interface for stored information, after which the data can then be acted upon directly.

The emerging venture-backed companies in the ICM space to watch are: Arkivio Inc. Kazeon Inc., Scentric Inc., and StoredIQ from the U.S. and Njini from the U.K.

Taneja Group projects that ICM will be a category of high priority for partnering, OEM and M&A activity amongst storage vendors over the next 24 months.

Network File Management
Over the past two years, several new companies have quietly been working toward creating an infrastructure-wide, truly network-resident approach to managing file services. We call these companies Network File Management (NFM) providers. NFM solution players have developed offerings that rise above the device complexity of traditional NAS devices, enabling a range of higher-level file services management to be delivered across the enterprise. In the tradition of Web and block-level storage tiers, these solutions can be considered file-level information switching platforms.

With NFM deployed in front of a file serving environment, enterprises can conduct a range of “virtualized” activities, including storage consolidation, archiving, migration, and backup optimization. The ROI gains from this approach to NAS management can be significant, and vastly superior to traditional device-centric management techniques.

Key players in NFM to watch for are Acopia Networks, NeoPath Networks, NuView Inc. and Rainfinity.

We expect that by 2007, NFM will be an increasingly standardized approach to solving a range of NAS management issues.

Wide Area File Services
In February 2004, we coined the term Wide Area File Services (WAFS) to describe a category of technology revolutionizing how companies deploy file services across distributed locations. Since then WAFS has blossomed into one of the hottest sectors in the storage market.

WAFS solutions replace traditional branch office file serving and backup solutions with simple thin “gateway” devices, unlike a cache. These 2U devices are typically equipped with some minimal amount of internal SATA storage. The devices spread out across the various remote offices then leverage the WAN for real-time communication back to a central server located in an enterprise data center. WAFS software associated with the central server maintains control over all permissions, access controls, data integrity, file management and data protection at remote locations.

Over the next 36 months, WAFS technology will transform the way many large enterprises manage distributed data. For this reason, we consider it one of the key trends in the entire data storage industry today.
The leading players in the WAFS market are Cisco Systems, which acquired Actona Technologies in July 2004, Riverbed Technology and Tacit Networks.

Room for Innovation
We have taken a brief look at three key technology areas for the data storage market - ICM, NFM and WAFS. While very diverse, they all point to increasing levels of functionality and intelligence for the movement, storing and retrieval of data.

It is staggering to note how quickly these categories have evolved in the market. Just 18 months ago, none of these categories existed as an identifiable group of companies or competitors. The fact that such a wide range of innovation in the storage space has congealed so quickly demonstrates that the entrepreneurial spirit within data storage is still running very strong. Taneja Group believes that as the demands of data management and the distributed enterprise continue to evolve, we can continue to expect a wide range of innovations and advancements from that formerly parochial sector of IT we know as ‘data storage’.

Brad O’Neill is a Senior Analyst with Taneja Group, an enterprise IT analyst and consulting firm. Based in Silicon Valley, O’Neill’s research focuses on emerging technologies in the data management and data storage market sectors.