Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019. Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Eric Bassier, Senior Director of Product Marketing and Corporate Communications, Quantum
Exciting Times Ahead for Data and Storage
As we look toward 2019, the fast-paced growth of video across
all industries plus the progress being made in autonomous vehicles and AI technologies
are at the forefront of our minds. Combine these trends with the growth the
market is seeing in areas such as machine learning, IoT, flash infrastructures
and more, and we are poised to experience an increase in daily data production in
2019 that is unlike anything the world has seen before. The net result of these
growth trends means that existing storage infrastructures will need to keep
pushing the boundaries of evolution to keep up. As the team at Quantum looks to
the coming year, we're focused on the trends that are driving increases in data
and the types of data seeing the most growth, and how storage technologies and
tiers will need to evolve to effectively handle all the different data
scenarios being presented. Here are our top five predictions for 2019:
1.
Video
content will grow exponentially, across many industries: Video and video-like data will constitute over 50
percent of all data being generated, from surveillance footage; consumer
images, voice, medical imagery, IoT, entertainment and social media. Large and
unstructured data is often 50 times larger than the average corporate
database. Video is unique, and
it is not typically a good fit for traditional backup; it cannot be compressed
or deduplicated, it doesn't work well with replication, snaps or clones, and
ingest speed is critical. This "unstructured" data - predominantly
video and images - is projected to surpass 100 Zetabytes worldwide by 2020.
Expect enterprise data services to be increasingly optimized for these data
sets, with infrastructure optimized for ingest processing and the
full life cycle management of this form of data.
2.
NVMe will
revolutionize media workflow infrastructures: NVMe will
finally allow our customers to unlock the true potential of flash -
dramatically reducing latencies and enabling IP-based infrastructures and
workflows, while reducing expensive fiber infrastructure costs. It also sets the stage for truly software
defined infrastructures and can free up hardware resources to focus on advanced
analytics.
3.
Autonomous
vehicle development will drive enormous data creation: As testing continues in 2019, cars are on the cusp
of Level 3 autonomy, so we can anticipate new workflows for the test vehicles
as they push forward from this point. Watch for other vehicles to become
autonomous as well in land, sea, and air. Data storage in the form of flash,
disk, tape and the cloud - and the ability to seamlessly move data between
these types of storage to balance access and cost factors - will be key in
supporting automotive vehicle development.
4.
Tape will
emerge as a fundamental part of hyperscale infrastructures: Tape
and the cloud will intersect and co-exist, helping to protect more
infrastructures against malware and ransomware. In the process, many companies
will recognize the unique benefits of LTO tape and public cloud storage.
Increasingly, companies will adopt the view that tape is not about offsite storage;
it's about offline storage. Further, it is possible we'll
actually see the tape market GROW in
2019 based on hyperscaler usage as long-term storage.
5.
Rise of
AI and analytics: Video
analytics can provide 100x the value of numerical analytics. Customers will
increasingly need deep media catalogues that provide visibility to all the
media assets at their disposal, whatever form are they in, and that show who
has edited them. The deep media catalogues will need to be much richer than
just a file system to accommodate more analytics functions. With video
surveillance, the analytics will need to analyze situations such as: Are those two
people having an argument? Are either of them holding a weapon? Are the people
at the end of a long grocery store checkout line getting frustrated? Applications
such as these will provide tremendous potential, given the right tools, to
deliver these answers and to provide advanced data services for video and
growth for video applications.
One thing
is certain. 2019 will be an exciting year for the data storage market and for
new advancements that will change the way we understand and interact with data
and the world around us.
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About the Author
Eric Bassier is Senior Director of Global Product Marketing
and Corporate Communications at Quantum. Eric has over 15 years of experience
designing, managing, and marketing enterprise storage products, and his writing
has appeared in Wired, Business Solutions, Data Center Post, Data Center Knowledge,
and more. Follow him on Twitter at @ericbassier.