Infinidat Blog

Data Storage in 2018 and Beyond

Data Storage in 2018 and Beyond

Ido Dubovi, Senior Product Manager and VMware expert, recently contributed an article published on vmblog.com. He shared his predictions for data storage in 2018 and beyond, in light of the ever-changing laws and IT environment. Here is a reprint of the article:

What Will We See in Data Storage in 2018 and Beyond?
In 2018, we can expect to see companies realigning their IT budgets as they continue to invest in solutions for digital transformation. Add to this the continued data security headlines with new laws in the US and GDPR on a global scale — all flash solutions tip unfavorably the economic scale for IT budgets. Here is how these issues impact data storage and where companies should focus their spending efforts:

    • Digital Transformation (DX): Companies continuing to invest in DX will also continue to reconcile their need for more storage capacity and greater performance to analyze the data they’re collecting. Predictions for the decline of high capacity disk drives are overstated [wrong], as the only reasonable economic way to capture, analyze, and retain DX data lies in high-capacity disk-based persistent storage. We will continue to see IT budgets being realigned, performance demands for multiple workloads increasing, and locality of reference becoming more important for data analysis, especially for real-time applications like fraud detection.
    • Data Security takes Top Spot (GDPR accelerates change): IT organizations that have declared themselves to be “flash only” will have to rethink their strategy, as the effective capacity of their storage shrinks to 1:1 and the cost per effective all-flash TB soars to 10X the cost of high capacity disk.
    • Encryption and Compression become commodities: With GDPR and potential new laws in the US, encryption will be required everywhere. Dedupe and compression are ineffective and we will see a major impact on effective storage capacity. We will see a shift in the value proposition to performance, availability, reliability, and ease of integration with vertical/horizontal solutions.
    • Cloud Inroads with the Enterprise: In 2018 and beyond, we will begin to see the proliferation of “edge” and “fog” computing. The cloud is too slow (bandwidth) for many applications and “smart” edge computing will compensate with data collection and analysis at the edge.
    • Networking is the New Bottleneck: In 2018 we see storage performance advancements (cache optimized designs, emerging NVMe fabric designs, etc.) remove storage from the “usual suspects” list of low performers and troublemakers. Ethernet will win (again) in the protocol battle for the next generation of data centers: NVMe over fabric will be a key component in the network protocol shakeout with Fibre Channel and we can expect to see 400GB/s and 800GB/s in production over the next few years. Standardizing on Ethernet has the potential to dramatically improve stack I/O efficiency. While NVMe will improve performance, DRAM cache optimized systems will still outperform all-flash systems and provide the best balance between multi-workload performance and long-term capacity requirements.

 

Ido DuboviIdo Dubovi is the Senior Product Manager and VMware expert responsible for driving INFINIDAT’s ecosystems integration. His work covers proprietary and open source platforms. An observant market watcher and analyst, he is a key influencer of INFINIDAT’s solutions roadmap. His prior roles include consultant for numerous IT verticals and storage architect for datacenter and cloud deployments.

About Drew Schlussel

Drew Schlussel (@realdschlussel) is the Director of Content Marketing at Infinidat.