2016 Storage Predictions - Move to a Hybrid Solution - Advanced Tape, Disk and Cloud
The Move to Hybrid Cloud
Due to limited capabilities and increased risk within the
public cloud, many organizations are integrating the private cloud within their
computing architectures to form stable and efficient hybrid cloud systems. cloud
data centers are consistently targeted and intermittently attacked by malware
and hackers, making them the most threatened data centers. With the hybrid
cloud, organizations can effortlessly adjust their public cloud resources to
accommodate changes while they maintaining sensitive information within their
private infrastructures.
Increased Prevalence of Active Archives
The declining price of HDD drives and tape systems are
making storage options more affordable and will allow for more organizations to
implement archive actives. This coincides with a desire for better business
insight with analytics using larger data sets and modeling to accelerate time to
results. Data is becoming more valuable as the use of analytics increases and
businesses want to use historical data to make better decisions. Active
archiving with unified data across multiple tiers of storage allows businesses
faster access to data, better insights and the ability to make more informed
decisions.
Seamless Storage Management Regardless of
Technology
New software
abstracts flash, disk, tape and cloud into simple, easy to use storage that
works within current user behavior (no special or custom integration required).
This intelligence will blur the line between performance storage and cost
effective capacity storage and it will make tape and cloud as easy to use as the
current c: drive. It will also reduce backup or even eliminate backup for fixed
content. Archive copies will become the new standard and intelligent storage
management will automatically provide data protection (numbers of copies,
self-healing function) both for local and off-site copies. It will also know
when to store the data flash for performance, tape/cloud for resiliency and cost
effective storage.
End to Vendor Lock-in
There will be a move away from proprietary solutions that
create vendor lock-in and lock-up user data with vendor dependency, i.e. silo
solutions or proprietary software and hardware. As we keep data longer or even
forever, we will need solutions that are flexible, vendor neutral, support
completely open formats and ensure that data can be accessible now and in the
future.
Expanded Role for Advanced Data Tape in Active Archive Environments
With organizations seeking to keep access to all of their
data and content indefinitely, new innovations in tape technology will make this
possible and affordable in an active archive environment. Increased capacity
coming from
LTO-7 now at 15TB compressed will help
reduce TCO and boost performance with a transfer speed of 750MB/s. The newly
extended LTO roadmap to generation 10 will allow organizations to leverage
investments already made in LTO systems and continue to migrate archived content
well into the future. Finally, tape's role will continue to grow as a seamless
part of the storage infrastructure and the cloud as it becomes easier to use as
a file and object storage solution due to LTFS.
Increased Use of Object Storage
Companies will increasingly expand their
active archives using object-based storage over file or block storage. Object
storage systems allow relatively inexpensive, scalable and durable retention of
massive amounts of unstructured data. With object storage, there is no file
system hierarchy. The architecture of the platform allows the data pool to scale
virtually to an unlimited size, while keeping the system simple to manage. The
efficiency of object storage makes massively scalable active data archives
affordable.