Chapter 10. Future Developments

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This chapter discusses:

What drives change?
SAN technology developments
Technology changes outside the SAN
New IT applications
The IT SAN management professional
Future applications
The final word

SAN technology is evolving at a rapid pace. This chapter describes future SAN developments and possible applications.

Someone once said, Study the future, because you re going to spend the rest of your life there. This would be a relatively easy task if the future stayed comfortably in the future, but it has a nasty habit of becoming the present faster than we can anticipate.

As a case in point, in Spring 2000, Celera Genomics announced that it had finished decoding the entire DNA map for an individual, a major milestone. Craig Venter, the president of Celera, pointed out that the privately funded project was well ahead of the federally funded Human Genome Project, which is scheduled for completion in 2003 or 2005 (sources vary on the year). Venter said supercomputers were used to analyze the information, and Celera would finish the work in a few weeks.

In a few weeks came just 12 weeks later, as this book was being prepared for the printer. At a news conference, called by the President of the United States and attended (via satellite link) by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Venter announced 99% completion, having sequenced 3.21 billion of the 3.5 billion chemical letters of the human genome.

The point is, the biggest breakthrough ever in biotechnology, disease eradication, and extension of human life happened years before it was predicted . Did computers and mass storage help this to happen?

Yes. It should come as no surprise to IT professionals that progress on sequencing, analyzing, and annotating the human genome requires a supercomputer and significant storage resources. In an interview on PBS television in April, Venter explained that the work had already consumed 80 TB of storage. It appears that this breakthrough would not have been possible without mass storage of tremendous scale ”exactly the scale of storage available through Storage Area Networks.

The human genome project, the first great technological breakthrough of the 21st century, is just the sort of thing the SAN makes possible. With this achievement as inspiration, let s look ahead to where SANs (and technology in general) are progressing.

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