The increasing adoption of hybrid and edge computing has shaped enterprise storage needs. While in the past, storage could be centralized in an on-premises data center, now decentralized storage infrastructure has become the norm. Indeed, storage technologies are evolving to keep pace with the increasing volumes of data generated not only in the data center but also at the edge. With the confluence of storage and other technologies such as artificial intelligence and data analytics, it becomes even more urgent to balance this technological boom with the physical.
In this context, efficiency has become the order of the day. Kashish Karnick, senior storage product manager at Lenovo’s data center group in Asia Pacific, says that as storage providers research new hardware, there will be new scrutiny and focus on efficiency.
This is where data management, migration and compression software comes in. “Hosting providers are accelerating their design, engineering and innovation primarily around management platforms,” said Rajnish Arora, vice president of enterprise IT at IDC Asia-Pacific. data handling.
“Vendors are focused on building software-defined storage stacks that provide data services to power workloads that not only run in virtual machines, but also in containers. , with greater flexibility, flexibility and resilience required in the digital age.
“The focus is on creating autonomous operations that support seamless data mobility in hybrid cloud environments, including infrastructure deployed at the edge.”
The Age of Lightning
As storage providers continue to refine their storage and data management software, including hyper-converged infrastructure software at the edge, they are also handling more data in storage. on flash storage systems.
“Flash will be here for the foreseeable future,” said Matt Swinbourne, chief technology officer for cloud architecture at NetApp Asia-Pacific. “Given the current split in the market between performance and flash capacity, and with tier-four cells (QLCs) now entering the enterprise market, there is a proliferation of increasingly economical storage platforms. cost.
“In terms of performance, so is the rise of express [NVMe] persistent and non-volatile memory solutions. We continue to see this market accelerate in two directions, one towards performance, the other towards the economy.
Meanwhile, flash storage device vendors will continue to innovate to offer higher flash densities, allowing users to start using all-flash arrays to optimize performance and capacity, Arora said. of IDC said.
Flash vendors are also working to improve the lifespan of flash media by increasing flash endurance, which is defined as the number of times the system can write or erase data from flash media. Vendors that build all-flash arrays write firmware that can intelligently handle wear leveling and smart block management. “Small random wear and tear shortens the life of flash media more than larger sequential writes,” says Arora. “The former causes rapid flash wear. The software allows the system vendor to ensure that data is written and erased evenly on flash media.
Hard drives and tapes will remain
Arora expects the hard drives to be used for a long time, especially in hybrid flash drive ranges to maximize capacity. Since hard drives still cost less than flash memory, they are ideal for secondary workloads or as backup and storage platforms that may not require fast access and retrieval.
“Companies always need repositories, secondary and third copies of data, test and development environments, and more. said Paul Haverfield, chief technology officer and director of pre-sales for hybrid computing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) in Asia Pacific. He added that there is a significant “sunk cost” in hard drive manufacturing as well as ongoing research and development, leaving manufacturers to use it to their advantage for as long as possible. and until the market speaks.
Lenovo’s Karnick expects this tipping point to occur when the cost per terabyte of flash memory approaches the price of hard drives, which could eventually be phased out. He noted that manufacturers have stopped producing 15,000 RPM (revolutions per minute) hard drives and that 10,000 RPM drives will be available soon.
“While the 7200rpm drive is still holding on to where it is now, the reality is that one day spinning platter physics will be their downfall,” he said. “It will be exciting to see the future unfold and storage as we know it will be reinvented.”
But what about the band? NetApp’s Swinbourne warns of the danger of predicting the end of archival technology, noting that companies still making large investments in tape storage require a significant positive business case change.
That said, a number of industries are seeing the benefits of retrieving data stored on tape and transforming it into an online or near-line solution, such as object storage, to create a data lake. to build machine learning data models or other analytical solutions.
“It’s a long and expensive process, but companies that can build business cases will reap huge benefits, such as avoiding unplanned downtime, optimizing costs, etc. maintenance or medical knowledge is better for a research institute,” Swinbourne said. “But those companies will be the exception.”
What is next? As of now, there is no clear successor or next technology for the next solid-state storage technology, says Haverfield of HPE. “In addition to flash media, there could be larger changes in the preparation of interfaces and protocols to allow us to get the maximum performance out of the flash that we have today,” he said. “We predict that protocols like NVMe and connections like NVMe on Fabric will be the next big disruption to storage architecture.”
Haverfield also expects a sequel to NAND flash in the form of next-generation solid-state storage technology – though it’s still unclear exactly what and when. “The solid-state storage industry is developing storage-layer memory that provides the durability of NAND flash memory at DRAM speeds and write cycles, overcoming two of the main disadvantages of NAND,” he stated.
Helium disk is another storage technology to watch out for. Since they create minimal friction, they could theoretically solve one of the most concerning problems of any storage device vendor in the world. “But they are also very expensive and will probably be replaced by flash at some point,” said Lenovo’s Karnick, although he thinks helium drives will coexist with