Current Filter: Storage>>>>>>

Key Word Search Filter within Articles: How will you read your data in 100 years?

   

Dave Wright, CEO of SolidFire, has a slightly different view: "2015 was a year of great change for enterprise storage and the larger IT market in general, as technology continues to experience accelerated cycles of innovation that the slow-moving dinosaurs of legacy IT just can't keep pace with. In 2016, expect to see more scrambling, more side-stepping, and more posturing from the big vendors while their world falls to pieces and a new class of disruptive companies arises to peak them up."

WELL DEFINED
Perhaps not surprisingly, the phrase 'software-defined' came up a lot in conversation. Nigel Stevens of IO said: "We can expect the storage industry to start moving towards a software-defined and increasingly automated model in 2016. Service providers have to reconcile that whilst data volumes and transactions via the data centre are increasing exponentially, computing and storage devices are reducing in size at almost the same rate. Whilst computing devices are becoming ever more efficient the inevitable outcome is higher power density. The best way to handle this is to use modular data centre blocks capable of handling variable power density combined with fully-automated systems."

Steve Wharton of SanDisk agrees that SDS is about to go mainstream: "If an enterprise hasn't already, 2016 may very well be the year they deploy SDS and data centre 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. And VMware's recently released Virtual SAN 6.0 finally allows performance critical apps to take advantage of flash. All of this sets the stage for even more server consolidation enabled by flash."

Some commentators didn't see the future for SDS as quite so rosy. Paul Silver of Tegile said: "Software defined storage will continue to underperform relative to other software defined technologies such as networking. Just as Information Lifecycle Management struggled to gain traction ten years ago, SDS is having a harder time than expected. I always like to say "storage is easy until something breaks". This is why we have not seen software-only storage solutions succeed. Gartner recently published a report exposing the complexities of a heterogeneous SDS environment, whilst VMware's Vvols show promise of managing VMs easier. Ultimately, this may make SDS even less attractive to IT managers."

FLASH IN THE PAN?
Flash is certainly core to most commentators' view with regard to the growth of SDS. "The need for enterprises to move faster is driving trends like IT-as-a-Service and the growth of data analytics, which in turn are driving the adoption of flash storage," says Manish Goel of HP Enterprise. "In addition to speed and predictable service levels, organisations adopting flash are also reducing storage footprint by up to 85% as they move away from spinning disk in favour of this higher density media. Faced with the need for agility, organisations want to take advantage of game-changers like flash without introducing risk."

Richard Blandford of Fordway believes that the humble hard disk still has some life left in it: "The spinning disk will still be with us for some time to come. For most organisations we believe the optimum storage solution will be a hybrid array or an intelligent file system overlaid over separate components. As with most things the Pareto principle applies; at present, a good ratio for most organisations will be something like 20% flash capacity for reads and writes for active data and 80% disk for longer term data retention, backup and archive. However, things are definitely changing.

"Today when we sell new consolidated storage we will use flash for active data read/write rather than disk, and as a result we are seeing 10K and 15K disks start to disappear. Disk is now taking the role that used to be filled by tape for secondary storage and long term dynamic archive, and we are seeing use of 7K and 5K SATA drives for passive data storage, with a drive to increase their capacity and reduce power utilisation. In effect with flash we have inserted another tier of storage or replaced 15K disks. Hybrid arrays are the most useful for general purpose workloads as you cannot get the data storage density on flash storage that you can with disk. As every IT director knows, there is always a trade-off between cost and performance. Just because flash costs are falling, it does not mean that an all-flash solution will be right for every business."

Fujitsu's David Histon agrees: "All Flash arrays are quickly giving way to the flexibility and increased consolidation benefits of hybrid arrays. This allows customers the flexibility and cost savings of being able to manage and configure all their storage performance requirements (high to low) from a single storage array. This can help customers meet the traditionally opposing demands from the business of increasing agility and reducing cost."

Page   1  2  3