iSCSI, virtualisation and business continuity are key to EMC's future, as Ken Steinhardt well knows.

Ken Steinhardt has just taken over as the chief technology officer of EMC's customer liaison organisation, at a time when the storage industry is experiencing a period of particularly explosive growth.

Steinhardt's role is to stay ahead of the trends in storage, feeding the company's ideas out to EMC's customers and the customer's ideas back to the company's management. Sitting at this cross-roads gives Steinhardt a unique perspective on the storage market, so ZDNet UK caught up with him just a few days after he took up his new role.

One of the really hot areas of development in the storage world is virtualisation. Steinhardt has some very clear ideas on the future and in particular what he sees as a key mistake many companies are making, going for a quick solution.

The lesson is to avoid the siren call of a low cost, easier-to-implement in-band virtualisation solution, as out-of-band is trickier but the only way to go, he says.

Q: What major trends do you see developing storage?
A: There are three things that are hot: virtualisation across the entire IT infrastructure; iSCSI; and business continuity — the concept of continuous data protection as an adjunct to back-up, recovery and disaster recovery.

For a whole heap of reasons, I think the value proposition of continuous data protection is just so overwhelming that it will become ultimately as common as back-up itself.

iSCSI, as a standard, has been around for some time. Is it really coming to the forefront now, and if so, why?
When the standard was finalised, roughly about three years ago now, this finally gave all the vendors clear direction in terms of, "how can I build things so that all of our products will play together?"

There were some vendors who jumped in before the standard, stirring things up, and I think that led people to wonder what was happening and why was it taking so long to get a standard. But they wound up with products that couldn't work with the reality of the market. Some of the most vocal vendors ultimately wound up not even being competitors.