A number of leading IT vendors, including EMC, IBM, Network Appliance, Storage Technology and Sun Microsystems, were canvassed recently about their views on the future of storage technology.

They agreed that corporates will want better storage management systems to reduce costs, and that there will be important developments in iSCSI and other storage networking technologies.

Chuck Hollis, vice president of markets and products at EMC, explained that open systems for managing switches, storage units and servers, regardless of vendor, are needed to lower costs and simplify management.

Dafs the way to do it

Keith Brown, Network Appliance's director of technology and strategy, argued that the Direct Access File System (Dafs) protocol will play an important role in data centre storage infrastructures from next year.

Dafs is the result of a collaborative effort among dozens of vendors, including Network Appliance, and is designed to improve performance for databases, web servers, email back-ends, and a host of other server-based applications.

Jai Menon, IBM fellow at the company's Almaden Research Center, promoted IBM's upcoming Storage Tank storage management system which will offer capabilities for storage virtualisation, policy-based storage management, and data sharing across heterogeneous storage systems, and is designed to reduce costs by simplifying the management process.

James Staten, director of strategy for Sun's Network Storage Division, and Randy Chalfant, director of StorageTek's corporate strategy, indicated that their companies lean more towards storage virtualisation and advanced volume management to improve storage control.

Open management platform

Although high-capacity storage and faster storage networking technologies are necessary to improve storage systems, management tools seem to offer the most room for improvement. Staten and Hollis agreed that an open management platform should be created so that all components, regardless of vendor, could be managed from a single point.

"Lack of good storage management standards and willingness by all vendors to co-operate [is the biggest challenge]," Staten said. "Sun has been working with the Fibre Channel Industry Association, the Storage Networking Industry Association, and other organisations to promote open standards, yet many vendors continue to push proprietary systems that give them greater differentiation."

Brown agreed that management of appliances and storage systems across the enterprise was an important challenge but added that replication and distribution of storage content also poses difficulties. He added that Network Appliance is trying to address these issues with its Data Fabric Manager and Content Director/Reporter products.

IBM's Menon explained the problem: "The biggest challenge of centralised storage management is the fact that the data is typically written from many servers through many file systems, and there is not a single entity in the infrastructure that is managing this process.

"Data is not placed on storage in consistent ways: the formats are all unique to the server file system that wrote the data, and there is no real thought given to efficient ways of placing that data."

Cost is crucial

EMC advocates a three-pronged approach to tackle these difficulties: centralising storage management to reduce the need for multiple storage management utilities on a network; automating storage management tasks to make storage less vulnerable to human error, data theft or corruption; and using hardware redundancy.

A desire by firms to reduce costs seems to be the biggest reason for the implementation of new storage systems. Most companies are looking to centralise storage, according to a recent survey of vendors.

Most respondents said that their customers are fed up with the management difficulties and limitations of direct-attached storage and want a powerful, centralised system to simplify management and improve availability.