SiliconANGLE has once again partnered with The Wikibon Project and storage service provider NetApp, hosting a #NetAppChat on Twitter this week. On the agenda? Clustered Storage: Meeting Tomorrow’s Data Storage Needs.

George Crump at Search Storage wrote an insightful description of what was then a relatively new paradigm on the data storage front, clustered storage. In his January 2009 article, Crump heralded its arrival stating, “The technology can overcome several obstacles storage professionals face…including scale, performance, reliability, upgradeability and ease of administration.”

Before the advent of clustered storage, organizations were made to choose between the two available traditional storage architectures. And often, compromise between a monolithic and a modular array was required due to budget constraints and an inability to predict what their future IO needs might be. Clustered architectures have shown themselves to be a happy medium, reducing both initial capital outlay and overall operating expenditures. Additionally, clustered storage allows both small- and medium-sized businesses to take advantage of storage opportunities where previously they had been left out in the cold, unable to avail themselves of either of the cost-prohibitive array architectures.

In this week’s #NetAppChat, several questions were put out to the twitterverse. Among them were:

• What types of storage challenges do application owners face to support their business critical applications?
• What are some of the important trends in data storage technologies and storage software for the support of business critical applications?
• How does NetApp’s approach to delivering IT agility differ from that of others in the industry?
• What is NetApp’s vision for the future of data storage? How does this align with application and solution providers?
• How do you see the storage space evolving in the next few years? What do solution providers need to do to keep up?

SiliconANGLE’s own Ryan Cox presented an excellent round-up of the virtual roundtable, highlighting some of the top-ranked answers to the above questions. One thing made evident by the expert panel and respondents is that the enterprise space, in constant evolution, requires a storage solution that can evolve right along with it. This would help to explain how NetApp, adopting an all-in strategy with clustering, was lauded by Wikibon co-founder and chief analyst Dave Vellante who commented their gamble could, “…pay off big time given the rapid adoption of software-led architectures in the enterprise.”

From its inception, clustered storage has shown itself to be a game changer in the enterprise. This week’s #NetAppChat helped in explaining where we can expect to see this architecture head in the very near future.