10 Reasons Storage Is Anything but Boring
With the rapid pace of IT innovation, not much in this industry is boring. That includes storage.
December 17, 2018
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Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and software-defined storage (SDS) replicate what was once done in specialized appliances.
“Suddenly, in the IT landscape we grew a new category of spend – HCI – today worth multibillions, and in another four to five years it will be close to $10 billion,” Kaustubh Das, vice president, product management, computing systems product group at Cisco, told us.
That takes a category of spend, which is storage arrays, and moves a portion of it into server-based storage.
IDC reported big growth for the hyperconverged systems segment for the second quarter of 2018. Sales of these systems totaled $1.2 billion in revenue representing more than 76 percent year-over-year growth. Hyperconverged systems represented more than 38 percent of the converged systems market.
A recent DataCore report found that more than half (56 percent) of IT respondents are strongly considering or planning to consider software-defined storage over the next 12 months. The survey questioned 400 IT professionals who are currently using or evaluating SDS.
The business drivers for SDS, according to survey respondents are: automation for frequent or complex storage operations (60 percent), simplified management of different types of storage (56 percent); and extending the life of existing storage assets (56 percent).
Paul Cronin, CEO of Apogee IT Services, a managed service provider, said that the company’s larger customers, with 75-250 users, are buying HPE’s hyperconverged platform, Simplivity, which provides compute, virtualization, backup and management in one box.
“This is the wave of the future however the price for this technology is too expensive for small companies with 15-75 users,” he said.
While popular and emerging storage technologies are stealing the thunder from old familiar ones like hard disk drives (HDD), HDD arrays are still selling, albeit at a slowing pace, as primary storage for smaller companies or companies that don’t have performance-sensitive workloads.
Also expect to see HDD sales continue for secondary storage applications that are not latency-sensitive and, in general, have fewer requirements around throughput and bandwidth than primary workloads. Some examples of secondary storage applications are backup, disaster recovery, archive and other types of cold storage or compliance-related storage.
In a period of about seven years (2011-2017), more than 70 percent of all external storage primary revenue was generated by all-flash arrays – it was a fast assent. Today, flash dominates. The total all-flash array (AFA) market was worth $2 billion in revenue,for the second quarter of 2018, a 42 percent year-over-year increase, according to IDC.
With no moving parts, and technology that’s fast, non-volatile and rewritable, flash is more expensive than HHD, but with a favorable total cost of ownership. It’s a no-brainer choice for businesses that need the speed and responsiveness for today’s applications.
While much of today’s solid-state drive (SSD) market relies on flash technology, it’s not likely to remain so.
While it’s often the case that the SSA market and all-flash market are terms used interchangeably – the early flash-array market was based on NAND, a solid-state technology – SSAs may include other types of solid state other than flash. The solid-state array (SSA) market is defined by customer requirements for highly automated, guaranteed low latency solid state storage arrays, according to Gartner.
Nonvolatile Memory Express (NVMe) is a storage protocol for accessing high-speed storage media and is important for very applications that are very data-driven. It’s high performance and low latency.
In a blog by Western Digital’s Rohit Gupta, enterprise segment manager, he noted that as businesses contend with perpetual data growth, they need to rethink how data is captured, preserved, accessed and transformed.
“Performance, economics and endurance of data at scale is paramount. NVMe is having a great impact on businesses and what they can do with data, particularly Fast Data for real-time analytics and emerging technologies,” he wrote.
In 2017, less than 1 percent of SSAs used NVMe internally. That’s going to represent more than 30 percent of revenue by 2021. IDC predicts that by the end of 2020, systems that use NVMe will generate more than half of external primary storage revenue.
There’s also NVMe over Fabric (NVMe-oF). NVMe-oF is the high-performance connection between servers and shared network storage that uses these NVMe high-performance devices.
NVMe-oF is the de facto standard for extending the NVMe architecture in a scalable manner of over mainstream interconnects. The standard is designed to enable nonvolatile memory express message-based commands to transfer data between a host computer and a target solid state storage device or system over a network. NVMe-oF helps boost performance, lower network latency and reduce bottlenecks, according to the NVM Express organization.
Storage class memory (SCM) is in between SSD (flash) and memory, such as DRAM. The technology is about sizable performance gains. SCM also takes memory, which was traditionally nonpersistent, and makes it a memory device that can live through a power outage.
“People’s high hopes is that this becomes your entire in-memory database – it’s very difficult to pay for that because it’s so expensive – but if you can get close to DRAM memory and large-scale capacities, I can put everything in memory or SCM and get sizable performance gains,” said Chad Kenney, vice president of products and solutions at Pure Storage.
Vendors in this space include Dell EMC, NetApp, IBM, Hitachi, HPE and Pure Storage, to name a handful. Currently, there are no volume shipments of SCM. HPE last month introduced a new class of storage built with SCM and NVMe called HPE Memory-Driven Flash, which will accelerate the performance of HPE 3PAR and HPE Nimble storage.
What HCI is doing to structured storage, object storage is doing to unstructured storage. So, what started in the cloud as object storage, from Amazon and Google, has gone on to spawn new smaller companies — SwiftStack, Scality, Cloudian and so on.
“This used to be a category that was very ‘nichey’ and suddenly started taking off over the last few years,” said Kaustubh Das, vice president, product management computing systems group, at Cisco. “I think it’s on a hockey-stick trajectory.”
Object storage feeds into the Hadoop ecosystem.
This leads to analytics techniques: traditional ones, more in the Hadoop ecosystem such as Cloudera Hortonworks, Splunk and SaS — or newer ones, AI and ML techniques such as TensorFlow, Caffe or MXNet.
You’ve got the techniques and processing power to analyze this data at a much deeper level that was previously possible.
“The techniques were available earlier,;the science was there, but we didn’t have the data, or have it stored in an accessible format, and we didn’t have the processing power to crunch that data,” said Das. “Now we have it.”
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), techniques that were invented decades ago, are taking off exponentially thanks to trends such as GPUs for processing and open frameworks; for example, open source.
AI/ML types of solutions require high bandwidth and ingest. Scale-out all-flash is enabling linear performance gains on top of linear capacity gains.
Pure Storage built AIRI, which allows users to do AI in a box, scaling from small to large environments. AIRI extends the power of NVIDIA DGX-1 systems with the massively parallel, all-flash performance of Pure FlashBlade.
AI is a market disruptor.
“It’s an initiative that if you don’t have it as vendor or customer, you will not be competitive in the market,” said Ivan Iannaccone, vice president and general manager, HPE 3PAR.
HPE recently announced additional AI and ML features in its InfoSight predictive analytics platform.
Apogee’s Cronin thinks that predictive analytics will make storage “a little more cool.”
There’s a global warming of cold data underway. There’s hot data (working on active data sets) and cold data (put in backup, archive, tape) — for legal discovery. We’re realizing that if you warm up cold data – that is, getting it into a form that’s readily accessible – you can run next-gen business development.
This warming up of data is a value-add for businesses where, previously, cold data was close to useless.
With its Optane DC Persistent Memory, Intel is driving the conversation in the industry around SCS as a technology.
Intel Optane technology is a combination of Intel 3D xPoint memory media with Intel-built advanced system memory controller, interface hardware and software IP. (A few years ago, Intel together with Micron Technology introduced 3D XPoint).
Optane DC Persistent Memory represents a new class of memory and storage technology designed for the data center. HPE’s Memory-Driven Flash announced last month was developed in partnership with Intel.
“Intel is pushing SCM at a base level and the vendors are leveraging Intel’s technology for products,” said IDC’s Burgener.
While not a startup player in the SCM space, this is a new business area for Intel.
Data is critical for today’s digital business. Enterprises are rethinking backup and recovery with a shift to as-a-service offers.
Data is valuable, and the evolution of data protection or data management is about data reuse across the organization. When it comes to data-protection modernization, IBM talks about restore, reuse and reinvent.
Research company Technavio looked at the global backup-as-a-service (BUaaS) market and predicts a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 27 percent from 2018-2022. The drivers: the exponential growth in data, and the fact that most legacy data centers aren’t built to handle such volumes of data or the threat from data stores.
Knowledge Sourcing Intelligence forecasts that the DRaaS market 2018-2023 is projected to grow at a CAGR of more than 17 percent, reaching about $3.3 billion in 2023 — up from less than $1.3 billion in 2017. The drivers: fast recovery, cost-effectiveness, and flexibility. DRaaS also offers automation capabilities enabling scalability, reliability and secure solutions to the enterprise.
“We’ve seen 30 percent growth for our hosting services. We have a data center that provides for backup of client data that is stored in the cloud to our data center. Office 365 is one of the big applications that we provide back up for. Our services are more cost-effective for our customers ,and they like the fact that we have the data stored outside the cloud and it’s accessible,” said Cronin.
Apogee uses Netapp for the hosting of backup due to the enterprise grade of its solution.
Data is critical for today’s digital business. Enterprises are rethinking backup and recovery with a shift to as-a-service offers.
Data is valuable, and the evolution of data protection or data management is about data reuse across the organization. When it comes to data-protection modernization, IBM talks about restore, reuse and reinvent.
Research company Technavio looked at the global backup-as-a-service (BUaaS) market and predicts a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 27 percent from 2018-2022. The drivers: the exponential growth in data, and the fact that most legacy data centers aren’t built to handle such volumes of data or the threat from data stores.
Knowledge Sourcing Intelligence forecasts that the DRaaS market 2018-2023 is projected to grow at a CAGR of more than 17 percent, reaching about $3.3 billion in 2023 — up from less than $1.3 billion in 2017. The drivers: fast recovery, cost-effectiveness, and flexibility. DRaaS also offers automation capabilities enabling scalability, reliability and secure solutions to the enterprise.
“We’ve seen 30 percent growth for our hosting services. We have a data center that provides for backup of client data that is stored in the cloud to our data center. Office 365 is one of the big applications that we provide back up for. Our services are more cost-effective for our customers ,and they like the fact that we have the data stored outside the cloud and it’s accessible,” said Cronin.
Apogee uses Netapp for the hosting of backup due to the enterprise grade of its solution.
With the rapid pace of IT innovation, agile infrastructure and the need for data to be close to customers and employees wherever they are, not much in this industry is boring. In the data center, that means servers, networking and storage.
Focusing on how people are thinking about storage today, there are some big trends to consider — there’s hybrid cloud, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), software-defined storage (SDS), adoption of solid-state drives (SSDs), data everywhere, backup, automation, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and so on.
And we know that the infrastructure of yesterday won’t be adequate for things like the internet of things (IoT), mobile computing, social media, artificial intelligence and machine learning.
“They require more agility than the static infrastructures of the past, which I think is one reason why cloud has done so well,” Eric Burgener, research vice president, infrastructure systems, platform and technologies at IDC, told Channel Futures. “Users can spin up technology for a short-term project, if they want to, without having to buy the infrastructure, and shut it down once the project is done, and stop paying for it.”
Tony Pompliano, president and chief executive officer at Anexio, says customers are migrating from premises-based storage to virtualized cloud storage with hyperscale cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, Google and SoftLayer, an IBM company — in addition to niche players like Anexio that compete with them Anexio offers IaaS, including colocation, networking and storage.
“Customers favor opex versus capex models,” he said. “[Opex] eliminates the procurement of hardware and software, licensing and warranty tracking, and installation and support of expensive equipment.”
He also said that with storage requirements growing exponentially, due to things like big data, IoT and compliance, it’s difficult for customers to make forecasts, budget and plan.
Throughout the fourth quarter of 2018, as part of our “In Focus” series, we are featuring a series of galleries designed to help partners grow their businesses in 2019 and beyond. |