Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2024. Read them in this 16th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Big Data Growth Brings Big Changes
By Tim Sherbak, Enterprise Products and Solutions Marketing, Quantum
Data continued its unprecedented growth explosion in 2023, but at even higher rates than previous years. In 2022, the data market was valued at $272 billion. It jumped to $308 billion this year and is expected to reach $745 billion by 2030. If organizations aren’t already on top of their storage infrastructure to manage this influx of data, and deploying AI-based solutions to unlock the value their data holds, they’re already behind the competition. AI data-driven insights will be a critical component of organizational growth and sustained success.
In 2024, we’ll see more innovation in the use of enterprise data than ever before. Wherever organizations find themselves at the end of 2023, there will be big changes to come over the next 12 months, especially in the realm of data storage and management.
Scalable File Systems and AI Workloads
In this coming year, we’ll see increasing adoption of new generations of file system technology, both on-prem and in the cloud, to keep up with explosive data growth and help organizations get the most value out of their data.
Modern file system software based on key-value stores, Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), and standard Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVME)-enabled platforms will break the scalability barrier that previously hampered file system adoption at cloud and big data analytics scale. As we move forward, file systems can effectively achieve the same flexibility, growth, and performance as all-flash object stores. Organizations will be able to extend the use of file systems as a core scalable data management tool to handle massive data-intensive applications and workloads, providing them with increased flexibility and options on how to best organize their unique datasets for consumption and use.
The Year of the Private Storage Cloud
While AI and analytics processing will expand across both on-prem and cloud computing infrastructures, strategies for inactive data will be under increased cost scrutiny. The continued onslaught of digital data sources, growing data value, and unpredictable cloud costs are causing organizations to move to a hybrid cloud model for data storage, with many strategically choosing to deploy their own in-house and co-located storage clouds. We’ll continue to see a pivot to multi-tiered, private storage clouds that are complemented by managed and hybrid cloud services from strategically selected suppliers. These solutions will be built with better cost efficiency, accessibility, and performance to aid in the use of data as a strategic asset easily accessible to the entire organization. Companies will more carefully evaluate their public cloud storage usage and look to optimize its usage for actively used data sets and ongoing cloud workloads.
Building the “Forever Archive” Storage Solution
As digital data continues to grow, so does its life span, and more organizations are recognizing its potential long-term value, meaning they’ll need to increase their data retention requirements from years to decades-or even longer. As we move into the new year, organizations must ask an important question to effectively set themselves up for a data-intensive future subject to the compounding storage requirements that lie ahead: “What will our data legacy be?”
Organizations must have a plan for their long-term management and ongoing platform infrastructure today to prepare for the years to come. The focus needs to be on how your data can be easily curated, accessed, and analyzed in the future. Organizations also must ensure that data is always durably protected.
In 2024 and beyond, organizations will be seeking out a storage architecture that can seamlessly adapt across multiple technologies and platforms for decades to come and remain easily accessible for analysis, all at a cost that doesn’t break the bank. It’s no longer just an option to consider the “far future” of your data – it’s a requirement.
Bifurcating Needs: Accelerated Value Creation and Cost Optimization
As we look forward in time, organizations will optimize storage purchases into two increasingly distinct and unique requirements and storage architectures. Production workloads and actively used data, i.e., “hot data” will be stored in scale-out, RDMA and NVME-based file system platforms co-resident with high performance computing infrastructure, both in the cloud and in-house environments. Warm and cold data must also be maintained online, well-catalogued with advanced analytics tools, but at dramatically lower cost than production workloads. Private storage clouds at petabyte scale, based on an optimized set of NVME, hard disk and tape media, will become a new standard feature of every large enterprise.
Organizations everywhere need to prioritize a robust storage infrastructure and embrace AI-driven solutions to harness the full potential of their data. The current landscape will see innovations in file system technology and the rise of private storage clouds to optimize cost and performance in the new year, and the growing distinction between production and archival data underscores the need for tailored storage architectures. As we enter the new year, organizations must proactively adapt to evolving technologies, ensuring their data remains accessible, analyzable, and secure over the long term, establishing a necessary strategy for sustained success in the data-intensive future.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tim Sherbak is an enterprise product and solutions manager at Quantum, a global leader in unstructured data management and storage. Tim’s passion is helping customers adopt new technologies and solutions for breakthrough results. Tim’s unique perspectives emanate from a broad range of experiences in product development, marketing, and sales across a variety of storage, systems, software, datacenter, and cloud technologies.
