Most times when you want to get a better idea about where technology is headed, you have to look past what your most immediate vendors are selling. For instance, you can pretty much guess what Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Dell will be offering in 2009 by looking at what Intel and AMD are talking about today.

The same concept holds true for storage. If you want to know what the storage vendors will be up to over the next two years, take a look at what the companies that make storage controllers are talking about.

Case in point is Emulex, which is working on a controller that can converge Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage systems. We probably won't see this technology show up in storage systems until 2010, but it's a comforting thought to know that somebody is working on this issue. After all, a lot of IT organizations are debating whether they should stick with Fibre Channel storage systems or move to iSCSI.

The good news is down the road IT organization can expect to deploy both types of storage systems in concert with each other. So whatever the storage investment IT organizations choose to make in 2009, they can expect to see some level of protection in that investment as controller technology continues to evolve.

The basic idea behind all this work is to essentially embed storage clustering technology into the controllers so IT organizations will see any type of storage array connected to that controller as an element of much larger pool of addressable storage. That not only means mass connectivity in terms of the types of storage systems that can be included in the pool, it also means that IT organization should expect to see much higher rates of storage utilization.

Of course, that prospect might cause some concern over performance issues, but by 2010 these systems will all be connected via a 10GB Ethernet adapter. Furthermore, there will be enough intelligence in the controller to allow IT organizations to set performance policies around any aspect of the array, which means that IT organizations can create service level agreements that reach all the way down to specific pools of virtual storage.

The only real downside to all these advances is how long it will take to reach this stage of mass connectivity. With all the interest in cloud computing, having the ability to create virtual pools of storage on the fly is going to be critical. So if we have one storage wish for 2009, it might be to tell the storage controller manufacturers to hurry up.