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11 Key Trends to Impact Storage in the Near Future

The storage market is quite a dynamic market wherein the prices are going southward and the storage capacities exactly opposite. But storage is gaining momentum in cloud arena, and SSDs are taking lead

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Ashok Pandey
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Impact Storage in the Near

The big storage solutions challenges of 2015 are how to make the data accessible on cloud seamlessly to users across the various devices without compromising the ever looming security threat. Talking about the cloud, Mr. Chris Chang, MD at ADATA Technology India Pvt Ltd says – there are two kinds of technologies available– one that is generally available for masses like Amazon Web services or Google Compute Engine that are very easy and simple to use even for novice. These have their inherent limitations like security of data, limitation of space, speed etc. Because of these limitations, they are not suitable for corporate use. To overcome this – there are specialists who provide robust and tailor made solutions for corporates 24x7. The industry today, understanding the importance of cloud storage, has been working out a mechanism to make cloud storage not only more easily available but also more cost effective.

Today the focus is slowly but steadily shifting towards flash-based products. Though a long way to go, but flash-based products like SSDs and the latest entrants , the M.2 SSDs, are surely going to be the game changer in the next couple of quarters at least in the professional series Desktop and laptop segments. With very low power consumption, extremely fast data speeds, small foot print, availability in a wide range of configurations, these are surely going to be the segment to watch out in the near future.

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Enterprise Storage: 6 Predictions for 2016

Predicting the future can be difficult, says Mr. Guruswamy Ganesh, VP - Corporate Engineering, SanDisk India, but with a little help from trends that emerged in 2015 as well as disruptive technologies that are now making their way to the forefront, it wasn’t difficult to analyze the top trends companies should keep in mind for the coming year. Here is a list of things to look out for next year in the enterprise storage space.

1. The cost will drive adoption

Cost is ultimately what drives the speed of new technology adoptions. As the cost of flash declines, we believe flash adoption in the enterprise will continue to grow as a result. According to an APJ survey conducted by IDC, organizations in India emerged as strong early adopters of all-flash array (AFA) storage systems, with 21.3% of the organizations already having the systems in production. In many instances, it’s not just long-term total cost of ownership (TCO) that makes flash more cost efficient – it’s actual purchase price or total cost of acquisition (TCA) of equipment that’s cheaper with SSDs. Having a better solution is just a bonus and the role of flash as primary storage should be firmly established.

2. Profitability will directly correlate to “Fast Data” processing

Organizations are not just contending with Big Data, and the demands of the exponential growth in capacity, but the need for “fast data”- data that is ready to be analyzed and mined as close to real time as possible. In 2016, infrastructure will have to respond as fast as the user, and businesses will rely on speed to make sure revenue is not lost. They will need to retain existing customers by delivering best-in-class experiences, and they will need the ability to capitalize on opportunities by utilizing collected data in the timeliest fashion before the opportunity is gone.

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3. 3D NAND architecture will gain traction

3D technology will be the next wave for flash technology development. In 2016, we’ll begin to see 3D flash starting to infuse flash-enabled devices and systems with high levels of performance and storage capacity. The end result? More storage inside laptops and smartphones, speed, and precision in Big Data processing, near real-time online experiences –and increased momentum toward the Internet of Things (IoT).

4. Application design will evolve

As flash continues to penetrate the enterprise, all-flash environments will lead to a massive boost in app response times and performance. But in order for that to happen first, applications will need to be better written for flash. We will see that shift take off next year. As the design process becomes more streamlined, developers will be able to leverage the faster data processing capabilities of flash to create apps that are more powerful and offer a richer experience.

5. Networking will continue to get faster

The network is no longer the bottleneck and we’re going to see more enterprises looking to upgrade their infrastructure. It is also now facilitating data movement to the right layer; as it’s getting faster, the demand on the server will be greater.

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6. Software Defined Storage (SDS) will go mainstream

If an enterprise hasn’t already, 2016 may very well be the year they deploy SDS and data center orchestration layers like OpenStack, which seems to have hit critical mass. We’re seeing a lot of converged systems relying on flash for performance being deployed in 2016 with flash performance compensating for the overhead of better management and abstraction. All of this sets the stage for even more server consolidation enabled by flash.

Bassam Tabbara, CTO at Quantum highlights a number of trends to watch across the market segments:

1. Object Storage: Ready for its Close-Up

Sensor based data – combined with new, sophisticated tools for analyzing buyer behavior – are driving Enterprise IT departments to retain increasing capacities of historical unstructured data to allow their users to assess the present in the context of the past. Businesses have reached the tipping point where traditional data storage methods can’t support the resulting high capacity workloads. Object storage, with its online scalability and robustness, is the answer. Object storage has been in use for some time in major cloud service providers, but the technology is seeing traction with commercial enterprises now because it can scale to meet the capacity needs of massive data sets while keeping data at the ready. The unrelenting growth of unstructured data, together with lengthening RAID re-build times on high-capacity disks, is finally pushing enterprises into using object storage to extend online access to data in multi-petabyte, non-block data storage.

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2. In Law Enforcement and Security, More Cameras + Higher Resolutions = Way More Data

Public safety has gone from a national security issue to the concern of every university, municipality, school and commercial enterprise. Cameras offer more sensors, wider panoramas, and higher resolution than ever before. And the resulting information is useful not just for today’s security but for tomorrow’s buyer analysis (and litigation protection). All these trends are driving the storage of more data, longer, for surveillance. As a result, security managers, who once installed standalone systems, are going to need to partner with Enterprise IT department to address digital storage as a part of their video surveillance architecture. And with the need for storage investment needing to be balanced against the budget for cameras and infrastructure, Enterprise IT must be ready to support them with an architecture that supports easy data access, but at the lowest cost of ownership. Tiered solutions with tape will increasingly be the answer.

3. ‘Archive as a Service’ Finds a Home for Compliance Data – In the Cloud

2015 was the year when cloud service providers – like Google and AWS - offered more (and less expensive) options for storing long term data in the cloud. A mass of vendors also offered gateways to help customers move their data off premise. But customers made their preferences known. They do not want piece part answers. Particularly for compliance data, they want fully outsourced solutions that simply remove the problem of archiving from the To Do list. 2016 will be the year these solutions arrive, with a major migration of customer compliance and “write once, hope to read never” data to the cloud.

4. When the Public Cloud is Not Enough

If over half of all enterprises are to adopt a hybrid cloud model by 2017 (as Gartner predicted last year) more organizations will be wrestling over where their data is stored. And, while public cloud is often touted as a more scalable and cost-effective storage solution than on-premise, the economics don’t always make sense depending upon the data to be stored and performance needed. The media & entertainment industry has been dealing with this issue for years, as production houses often need to move massive video data sets quickly across disparate locations and recalling data from a public cloud would be far too expensive and time-consuming. In 2016, as more enterprise IT departments wrestle with massive data workloads generated from corporate video marketing, virtualization and the Internet of Things, they will also turn to on-prem cloud storage to get the job done quickly and on-budget.

5. Specialized storage for surveillance

Security is a growing concern, not only across the country but globally. It is for this reason that CCTV and surveillance cameras are being deployed everywhere, right from homes to large enterprises. To support these, purpose-built surveillance drives are being deployed and their adoption is likely to increase in the coming year says Khwaja Saifuddin, Senior Director - South Asia, Middle East and Africa, WD.

Expectations in the Year 2016

The year 2016 definitely looks to be the year of the comeback of flash with splash and that too in mid and large capacities. Beginning from the ubiquitous pen drives, hard drives (both external and internal), flash cards are going in the direction of personal cloud, with being Wi-Fi driven, making data accessibility easier for consumers. The trends in 2016 would be on storage gaining momentum in the cloud arena, SSDs taking lead, and more and more storage devices getting hooked on to Wi-Fi.

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