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What's in store for you?

— photo; special arrangement

Real or virtual?: IBM’s 1 TB tape drive (top) and Seagate’s 1.5 TB hard disk.

Agigabyte is so `yesterday.' With personal computer storage, even for lay customers, crossing the lakshman rekha of one terabyte or a thousand gigabytes; with enterprise users being offered petabytes or 1000 terabytes at a time of hard disk space, physical storage seems to be hurtling along an unstoppable growth path. But a quiet undercurrent in what is now called `Cloud computing', looks like slowing this headlong rush.

Increasingly, users are being offered vast storage facilities on the Web - virtual storage which they can call their own, but which can be accessed only when one is `online'.

Many Web players offer anything from 2 to 4 gigabytes of free storage on the Web and if it is a specialist site like photo sharing, the storage is `unlimited'. You get to decide which portions of your virtual disk are private, and which you would like to share with select friends, or just anybody.

The new generation

The new generation of ultra small form factor PCs which are variously called NetBooks or Mobile Internet Devices, come with semiconductor Flash storage - which is currently limited to some thing like 4-8 GB.

So it makes sense for such users to store the bulk of their files in one of these virtual spaces as well as using Webbased rather than PC-based office tools.

The major players in the traditional disk and tape based storage industry, clearly believe in the adage "if you can't fight them, join them."

In recent months, EMC, one of the biggest players at the enterprise end of physical storage, acquired Iomega, a company whose products address the consumer hard drive market; as well as Mozy, an online back up service( www.mozy.com ).

Now Iomega hard disk buyers are being offered complementary space at Mozy's web address to keep back-up copies of their hard drive content. On Monday, Mozy announced that it had doubled its customer base just in the first half of 2008, to some 750,000 users who have entrusted 7.6 billion files to its 10-petabyte online storage vaults.

However tape players are not about to roll over and die: Just this month, both IBM and Sun laid claim to having developed the world's first 1- TB tape drive: IBM's TS1130 improved on its previous 700 GB tape offering; while Sun's StorageTek T10000B Fibre Channel Tape drive, doubled its capacity from a previous 500 GB.

They claimed data delivery rates in the region 120-160 MBPS, which would cut by half, the time taken for typical data backup on tape. At these capacities and speeds, tapes don't come cheap, they were priced around $38,000.

Meanwhile Seagate, a player in the middle of the disk spectrum, announced last month, that it had shipped its billionth hard drive and would ship its next billion within five years. extremely rapid escalation.

On July 15, Seagate shipped the world's first 1.5 terabyte desktop PC drive, the Barracuda 7200.11 and also delivered the highest capacity drives for notebooks, the miniature 2.5 inch diameter Momentus 5400.6 and 5400.4 with half a terabyte each.

Today's terabyte drives have brought down the unit cost of disk storage to onefive- thousandth of a cent per MB ($0.00022 / MB).

Clearly both disk and tape technologies are doing well and there are strong protagonists for both options.

The hottest discussions meanwhile, have shifted to second guessing future storage trends: The virtues of virtualization: many physical storage units acting as a single virtual entity; Fibre channel versus gigabit Ethernet as the dominant storage standard; De-duplication: cutting out redundant data in multiple storage locations.And increasingly, the slow inroads made by Flash as a third technology option for storage.

Storage leader

That Flash has a future beyond the ubiquitous `thumb' or USB drive was evident when a storage leader like Sun announced that it would use Flash in its server storage; even as EMC has begun shipping solid state (that is, Flashbased) disk arrays for its corporate customers.

Other innovations include Western Digital's MyBook Mirror dual storage system, where the data is continuously saved twice, on each of two internal disk drives, of 1TB or 2TB capacity, thus making backup an automatic process.

Western Digital has evangelized the need for not just bigger and faster drives but `greener' drives, consuming less power. This is a pan-industry concern and one fall out is that data centres may soon retrofit more energy-efficient drives that run a bit slower.

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