Advertisment

Emerging Trends in Enterprise Storage Tech

In this era of data boom, businesses need to revamp their storage infrastructure to incorporate new technologies to improve efficiencies and support new business needs. Sanghamitra from CIOL bureau interacted with Mark Re - SVP, CTO, Seagate Technology to find out the latest innovations in storage tech

author-image
PCQ Bureau
New Update
8-Self-Hosted Cloud- Storage

– Mark Re - SVP, CTO, Seagate Technology

We live in the era of data explosion and the time has come for organizations to plan for a robust data storage infrastructure to attain efficiencies. In these times, some of the big trends are Big data, IoT (Internet of Things), mobility and cloud. As a matter of fact, these trends are driving the need for more advanced and sophisticated storage solutions as well.

Mark-Re---SVP,-CTO_Seagate- Mark Re SVP, CTO, Seagate Technology

Innovations in storage tech

We know that technology trends like IoT, mobility, social media are bringing changes in data consumption patterns and creating new demands. What we are seeing today is that these trends are not limited to enterprises. Even consumers are adopting these trends rapidly as well. With these trends, the amount of content that is being created, stored and accessed on the go, is increasing. Hence there is a need for a storage solution with a high capacity, delivering efficient performance.

Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) and Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technologies have improved the areal density (the amount of data that can be stored on a single disk) while maintaining a low cost per gigabyte, in order to support global growth in cloud and mobile usage.

In addition, the adoption of Hybrid technology as the future of next- gen storage is a key trend. What makes the hybrid drive special is that it combines the high-capacity of a HDD with SSD-like speed at a fraction of the price. So users can get the speed they want and the capacity they need in one drive, bridging the gap between a HDD and SSD with the best value/ performance option for consumers.

Apart from this, in today’s era of BYOD where it has become imperative for people to carry, retrieve and share data on-the-go, consumers are facing storage constraint issues on their mobile devices. Therefore, portable and wireless storage drives appeal to anyone who uses a smartphone, tablet or other mobile device and stores digital content in it. Consumers have embraced the idea of carrying and sharing their content on the go, and require greater storage capacities to do so.

Meeting SMB storage needs

Data is the lifeblood of any businesses. How well a company manages and protects the data can go a long way towards determining its success or failure. However, given SMEs’ limited budgets and manpower, setting up a strong enough IT infrastructure that supports and protects company’s entire data is often a big challenge.

Today, cloud computing has brought a revolution to SMEs. Cloud storage provides notably easy access to data from any place where there is an Internet connection. However, a lot of businesses are also aware of potential security and operational cost issues.

In view of this, smarter SMEs are adopting a mixed approach to their storage needs. While leveraging on the benefits of what the cloud services can offer, they also integrate what we call a NAS (network-attached storage) solution. The key advantage of this approach is that it allows SMEs to establish their own cloud storage while keeping control of their data.

For example, there are many organisations with networks of up to 50 computers, and with little-to-none IT support available in-house. Networked Attached Storage (NAS) solutions are designed to be easily up and running without dedicated IT support. This helps small businesses stay organised and focused. The NAS device management is effortless from a desktop, laptop, tablet, or even a smartphone.

The NAS HDDs highest-capacity storage for 1- to 8-bay NAS systems. NAS HDD has been specifically designed to minimise rotational vibration (RV) effects typically found in multi-drive solutions, improving system performance and reliability. Extended error recovery controls helps to ensure drives comply with NAS system requirements for better data integrity that quickly and reliably support home and business applications.

How Digital India helps enhance storage tech

Consumers in India are rapidly embracing and adopting new technologies like cloud and portable storage, and several visionary government campaigns have opened up many new avenues.

Under the Digital India campaign, we expect to see deeper mobile device penetration and increasing use of video, big data analytics and the cloud. All of this will continue to drive data growth and require larger and more effective storage solutions. Also, the Indian government’s Smart City vision will generate a greater dependency on technology and hence an amplified need for critical data storage, analysis and retrieval.

Upcoming storage tech

Seagate is working with CERN openlab to collaborate on the development of the Seagate Kinetic Open Storage platform. CERN Openlab’s mission is to accelerate the development of innovative new solutions to be used by the worldwide LHC community. CERN Openlab provides companies with a framework to test and validate cutting-edge information technologies and services in partnership with CERN. The partnership aims to help CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, to better manage and store the 100 petabytes of data the Large Hadron Collider has generated to date, as well as the additional 2-3 petabytes of information it produces on a monthly basis in its quest to further humanity’s understanding of the universe.

Seagate is also working on Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) and Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) to increase the capacity of the drives. Apart from this, they are working on Two Dimensional Magnetic Recording (TDMR), which places one more data reader onto a drive’s read/write head.

smes storage enterprise
Advertisment