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We've some genuinely fascinating content in this issue of Storage magazine, including a number of different views of the technology behind most storage systems, disk. On the one hand we've an in-depth analysis of the likely future roadmap of some of our biggest hardware vendors, including comment from Seagate, Toshiba and IDC among others. One key issue is that even as users demand almost infinite 'expansion room' for all their data, hard drive technology has hit a stumbling block in aereal density. One solution to this might be SMR, a technology approach we looked at a few issues back. "With nearly 7 billion inhabitants on earth we are creating an astounding 2.7 Zettabytes of data a year and as such are rapidly approaching the physical limits of how much can be written on a single conventional hard disk drive," said Mark Re, Seagate's chief technology officer. "With SMR technology, Seagate is on track to improve areal density by up to 25 percent or 1.25TB per disk, delivering hard drives with the lowest cost per gigabyte and reaching capacities of 5TB and beyond."

Elsewhere Nick Spittle of Toshiba Storage Products Division examines how a tiered storage architecture can exploit the best features of both SSD and HDD, allocating data according to access needs. He argues: "SSDs should not be viewed as the 'HDD killer', but rather as a complementary technology to enhance existing storage infrastructure. As NAND prices become more competitive, the application potential will broaden. Given their technological capabilities, HDDs and SSDs will continue to coexist in the data storage market for years to come."

We also take a close look at the effect that increased virtualisation is having on DR/business continuity strategies, and we also re-convene our occasional round table, this time to discuss email archiving best practice with a number of industry experts including EASY Software's Howard Frear, who suggests: "Email in the Cloud is now quite well established, with all the mainstream vendors providing the capability of operating this most mission critical of applications via highly available data centres. So the related question - that of the increasingly important choice of email archiving technologies either for compliance, e-discovery or better data management - is usually one of an additional charge per mailbox as part of the Cloud service. For service providers offering these platforms, there is a significant advantage in deploying multi-tenanted email archiving solutions."

As ever we'd love to hear what you think about the views expressed in the magazine - feel free to email me at the address below with any comments.

David Tyler
david.tyler@btc.co.uk