As part of our new blog Q&A series, i365 has been speaking with industry thought leaders to glean insight into the world of storage and the future of the industry.  This past week we caught up with Robin Harris at StorageMojo to ask a few questions.  With over 20 years in the data storage industry, Robin’s focus on marketable technology and paradigm shifts in storage technologies made for an excellent Q&A session revolving around the cloud, virtualization, and other new trends.

i365: On your blog, you write that digital storage has enabled digital civilization, just like writing has enabled human civilization—what impact do you believe the cloud will have on this premise, especially as it relates to SMBs?

RH: Marshall McLuhan thought that the impact of medium is independent of its content. In other words, the structure of a medium is what affects human consciousness, not the information that the medium communicates.

Cloud storage is most important now because it changes the economics of storage and delivers benefits that were not often available to small and medium businesses. An SMB can have a disaster tolerant infrastructure for a few dollars a month that just a decade ago would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

While that is a very good thing, we have barely begun to exploit the potential for large-scale collaboration that cloud storage enables. Google’s Wave project is a step in the right direction, but it lacks the business value infrastructure required to monetize cloud-based collaboration.

19th century industrial-scale communications (telegraph and telephone) and industrial-scale transportation (steamships and railroads) enabled massive corporations that coordinated actions and goods throughout the world. What new forms will 21st century Internet-scale information storage and sharing enable?

i365: It seems that despite a real focus around the world of cloud computing, businesses are hesitant to fully embrace the idea of cloud storage and data backup.  Do you see on-site storage appliances linked to the cloud serving as on-ramps between physical storage and cloud backup, thus mitigating fears about performance and security?

RH: The big problems with cloud storage are latency and bandwidth. Once net neutrality is the law of the land the bandwidth issues will be fixed in short order. But the latency issue is never going away. Given the way most data is lost — fat fingers on the keyboard — maintaining a local data repository for fast file restores makes a lot of sense. A local cache of 12-18 months of business files, with those and older files encrypted and stored in the cloud, should be more than sufficient for most SMB’s.

Think of them as local backup, recovery, indexing and e-discovery POPs. It will take a few years, but an Office-like suite of standard SMB apps will emerge that provide instant local value that small businesses can see as well as insurance aspects like DR and e-discovery. Getting the right services mix for the right price is the trick.

i365: The new emphasis on virtualization and cloud applications seen at VMWorld and other events this past year will have significant implications for the storage industry.  What new storage related services do you see these two trends enabling?

RH: First of all, there is a long way to go before storage for VM environments is anywhere near as flexible as VMs are today. This is a major problem that VM partisans are mostly ignoring. Furthermore, there are signs that VM adoption is going to hit a wall similar to the one that hit SANs in the early 2000s – the vendor desire for lock-in will meet the customer desire for choice – and the vendors will lose.

Microsoft’s Hyper-V and their ferocious pricing is the wild card here. VMware has a big lead, but there is nothing magic about what they’ve done. If Microsoft continues to play the pricing card and drives for feature parity, VMware – or their gross margin – is toast.

i365: Looking forward into 2010, are there any other trends in cloud storage you see developing?

RH: Cloud-based NAS is an obvious winner: why worry about proprietary interfaces when you already have a couple of perfectly good network storage paradigms?

Hybrid enterprise/cloud infrastructures promise real savings as well as increased capabilities. You can add large increments of availability and reduce data loss through low-cost investments in cloud storage. Hybrid is a popular term in automobile engineering right now. It also applies to data centers.