With the launch of this conversation on The Future of Storage, we wanted to share with you a little about how the Techdirt Insight Community is contributing to this site. The Techdirt Insight Community is a group of experts with insight and knowledge in the technology and business world, who compete to provide their insight and analysis in various “contests” held within the community. In some cases, this insight and analysis is used for internal purposes and in many others, it’s used for external purposes, such as this site.

We’ve presented a topic starter description within the Insight Community concerning some of the big issues having to do with the future of storage, and the best insights provided from the Community, will then be posted on this site, where they can contribute to the wider discussion. If you have expertise in this area and would like to join the Techdirt Insight Community to take part, you can do so here.

In the meantime, to frame this initial conversation, we focused on some of the most immediate changes facing the market: Ethernet vs. Fibre Channel, and iSCSI vs FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) along with the growing list of optimization features appearing in today’s storage systems (thin provisioning, de-duplification, encryption to name a few).

Just to get the insight flowing, we suggested the following key questions for the Insight Community to tackle:

• How do you see the current SAN market, and where do you think it’s going?
• For FC users, will they wait for proposed FCoE products before the next upgrade, and if so, how long?
• What are the biggest pains around block storage — performance? growth? management? How have you or those you know dealt with these?
• What are the storage implications when dealing with server virtualization?
• How does disaster recovery play into the SAN discussion? When dealing with disaster recovery are there better options for mirroring and data migration?
• Where do you think things stand with de-duplification? Is it ready for prime-time and why or why not? Where is that space heading and what impact will it have on the rest of the market?

We’re thrilled that the Techdirt Insight Community can be a part of this larger conversation on the future of storage and we look forward to a great discussion.