Storage is a critical issue for some industries, given that their data grows 60 percent or more year-on-year. To the pressure for more space, add power consumption concerns, the trend towards virtualisation and the paradoxically negative effect of cheaper disk on storage management and you have an interesting year ahead.

Present at a Brainstorm roundtable discussion to give their opinions on storage trends in 2008 were: Guy Kimble, information and operations director of Metrofile; Manfred Gramlich, storage practice lead at Sun Microsystems SA; Andre Froneman, pre-sales storage specialist at Quantum Africa; Malcolm Tiley, divisional manager of advanced technology services at Bytes Technology Group; Sheldon Hand, pre-sales consulting manager at Symantec; Paul de Reuck, IBM system storage brand manager for central and southern Africa; Doug Downing, enterprise brand manager at Dell; Alex Robertson, technology solutions manager at EMC; Eli Lopez, area director: Western Europe for NetApp; Richard Trickey, director of Sysdba; Marius Nicholson, managing director of Naxian; and Petrus Human, head of professional services at Attix5. This is an edited version of the discussion.