Predictions on the future of data storage

Computerworld - We had an overwhelming response to our call for predictions regarding the future of enterprise data storage. Here are some of the prognostications we collected:
Three years from now, the terms SAN and NAS will be meaningless. SAN and NAS will evolve into a single technology that includes the benefits of both. This is the same thing that happened with routers and switches in the networking world. Today, almost nobody understands the difference between a router and a Layer 4 or a Layer 7 switch -- and almost nobody cares! People have already figured out that any serious storage infrastructure requires both SAN and NAS. In three to five years, customers will insist on multilingual systems that can speak block-based protocols, like Fibre Channel and iSCSI, as well as file-based protocols.
-- Dave Hitz, founder and executive vice president of engineering, Network Appliance Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif.
Automated networked storage is the way of the future. Over the next three years, direct-attached storage will play a diminishing role in the enterprise. The pace of decline will be faster than most analysts predict. Today, it's unusual to find a server that isn't networked. In a few years, it will be just as unusual to find storage that isn't networked.
-- Joe Tucci, president and CEO, EMC Corp., Hopkinton, Mass.
I envision a day when you walk into an airport and your handheld device hooks into the airport network and tells you your gate number, seat assignment and departure time. You'll even be able to relay to the airline whether you want the chicken or the fish for your in-flight special meal. All this will require a mountainous amount of data that will need to be distributed, cached, stored, managed and protected. Storage management software will need to be flexible and robust and have the ability to interoperate with a variety of different platforms.
-- Jose Iglesias, director of storage products, IBM Tivoli Software, Austin, Texas
E-mail servers and their related storage as we know them today will be dead in three to five years. The costs and management of e-mail servers continue to spiral upward, while today's PCs are more storage-rich than ever before. Their storage capacity is "free" and yet relatively untapped. Free PC storage, combined with aggressive server-to-PC e-mail migration and better PC data management, will solve storage problems at a much lower cost to corporations than traditional, centralized server approaches.
-- Dave Cane, chairman and senior vice president of research and development, Connected Corp., Framingham, Mass.
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