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Gartner Group: Storage Networking Will Rise
At its Gartner Symposium last week in Orlando, Fla.Gartner, Inc. said it expected to Storage Networking to rise in numbers, asadministrators need better ways to manage storage.
According to the firm, eighty per cent of externalstorage will be networked by 2005. Because storage needs are growingexponentially, enterprises will turn to increasingly advanced tools to managethe storage.
Gartner says most enterprises plan for a doubling instorage capacity each year, but lack the resources to hire new administratorsto manage the storage. Internet datacenters see even greater rates of growth,seeing storage double in a quarter.
According to Nick Allen, vice president and researchdirector at Gartner, although many new tools for managing storage have appearedon the market in the past few years, most of the tools are insufficient to keepup with the explosive growth in storage. Ideally, a storage management systemwill allow storage pools to grow, while allowing the number of administratorsto stay the same.
Gartner uses a two-tiered definition for storagenetworks. In the first tier- the plumbing tier, lies connectivity hardware andsystems, such as Host Bus Adapters, switches, and drivers. The second tierincludes software for managing the storage pools and networks, providingadministrators with added services beyond consolidation. This definitionexcludes storage directly attached with SCSI or ESCON.