Data Center Technologies: 10 On Endangered List

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IT luminaries are forever chanting about the joys of the latest technology that is soon to become ubiquitous in the data center. Notable examples in recent years have been thin clients, information lifecycle management (ILM), MAIDand pizza box servers. Clearly, it is very easy to get it wrong when attempting to predict the technologies that will become dominant in the future.

So let’s forget prognostication and take a different look into the crystal ball. Instead of predicting which technologies will take over in the future, let’s predict what won’t be there, or what will gradually start to fade in the storage and data center world.

Mike Karp, an analyst with Ptak Noel and Associates, took at stab at just that. Here is his Top 10 list of technologies that will fade away:

Scripts. There will be fewer and fewer opportunities for people writing scripts. Even within the mainframe world where scripting is second only to breathing, scripting will greatly diminish. And the reason is simple — as the old brigade fades into retirement, they will be replaced by a younger set with no real scripting orientation. “All the newer IT staffers have grown up with GUIs, and that is what most of them want to work with,” said Karp. “Also, scripts don’t automate well.”
Tape drives. People have been predicting the demise of tape for almost a decade. While Karp stops short of that, he believes there will be a lot fewer tapes in data centers of the future. As disk-to-disk backups in various forms and electronic replication to DR sites become more prevalent, tape will continue to lose ground. However, there will always be a need for some of these in order to retrieve data from older archives.
Fibre Channel hard disk drives (HDDs). Karp wonders just what the need is for these drives any more, and believes data storage managers are gradually arriving at a similar conclusion. “FC drives offer nothing that SAS drives do not have, and the SAS/SATAcombination is clearly winning the premier position on the data center floor,” said Karp.
Read the rest at Enterprise Storage Forum.