Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2016.  Read them in this 8th Annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Mohit Aron, Founder and CEO, Cohesity

The Rise of Copy Data Management

In 2015, enterprise data storage emerged as a hot topic once again. One category that gained a significant amount of attention was copy data management. According to a recent archive and backup convergence study by ESG, a majority of IT organizations are seeking solutions that manage "copy data" within their environment because copies of data will cost organizations over $50.63B by 2018. Many of this year's hottest storage startups classified themselves in this new category; however, the term means different things to different people. Recently named a new market category and included in Gartner's 2015 Hype Cycle for Storage Technologies, copy data management is expected to garner more attention in the next couple years and play a crucial part of the next phase in the evolution of data storage.

Commonly, copy data management is understood as an approach to data protection that reduces the amount of data copies within an organization, making data easier to store and access while being kept protected. With the growing concern about "dark data" - large unstructured data sets that demand enormous resources yet return no immediate business value and remain unanalyzed - enterprises are turning to copy data management to regain control of their data. This method uses an underlying snapshot capability to create a virtual copy of the data, which reduces the overall amount of storage space used.

Conversely, traditional secondary storage creates redundant copies of an organization's data for different use cases. In some instances, companies copy their data up to three times by storing data to their primary server, secondary backup and then restoring copies of that data for test/dev on separate storage silos. This is not practical or efficient for modern IT systems dealing with an exponential amount of data growth. Copy data management enables organizations to easily access their data and provision storage to developers on an as-needed basis, without the risk of accidentally deleting or altering the golden copy of production data.

In 2016, we predict copy data management will mature as a market category and will push beyond the boundaries of the disaster recovery space by enabling companies to use data storage solutions to uncover key business insights. Copy data management will continue to rise in popularity as enterprises seek more efficient and intelligent ways to store, protect and learn from their data. Better architectural approaches to handling massive scale will move the category forward as well, and enable even the largest enterprises to take on a more holistic approach to lowering the cost of managing all their secondary storage data. 

Additionally, as enterprises accelerate their big data strategies, they will realize moving compute to the data will be a much more efficient approach than creating separate data lakes and big data farms for analytics.  Timely insight that is actionable will be delivered in 2016 with in-place analytics that reside where the data is stored, leveraging the extra compute power of server-based storage in a web-scale architecture.  Better intelligence and simpler data management are ahead for the new year.

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About the Author

Cohesity was founded in June 2013 by CEO Mohit Aron, who is regarded as the pioneer of hyper-convergence, the first architecture to converge compute and storage to simplify virtualization. Aron founded the infrastructure company Nutanix to bring hyper-convergence to market and served as its CTO before leaving to build Cohesity. Aron worked as a Staff Engineer at Google from 2003 to 2007, where he helped design the company's innovative Google File System. He also served as Architect at AsterData, a leading big data analytics company that was later acquired by Teradata.

Mohit holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rice University.