Tony Pearson presented on the future of storage. Key points included:
1) Advances in technologies like flash storage, storage virtualization, data deduplication, and cloud storage are changing how organizations manage their storage assets and treat storage as a pooled resource.
2) The roles of different storage types are shifting, with solid state drives becoming more optimal for primary data and disk and tape more suited to backup data and long term retention.
3) Improvements in bandwidth are driving convergence of networks and protocols like FCoE, iSCSI, and CIFS.
4) Cloud computing is driving standardization, automation, and management approaches that also impact internal IT departments.