By Paul Speciale, Chief Product Officer, Scality

Storage Lives on the Edge

The year 2020 will continue to see both the evolution and advancement of the storage industry with the cloud, edge computing and digital transformation being top of mind.  As organizations tackle these changes, storage decentralization and multi-protocol systems will be adopted and a significant focus in the year ahead.

Object storage at the edge will be on Flash: 

Object storage will move into the edge, for applications that capture large data streams from a wide variety of mobile, IoT and other connected devices. This will include event streams and logs, sensor and device data, vehicle drive data, image and video media data and more, with high data rates and high concurrency from thousands or more simultaneous data streams. These applications will be developed for cloud native deployment, and will therefore naturally embrace RESTful object style storage protocols - making object storage on flash media an optimal choice on the edge to support this emerging class of data-centric applications.

Multi-Cloud Unification:

Data storage will become massively decentralized, as enterprises leverage a combination of on-premises and public cloud IT resources. This will create a need for a unified namespace and control plane to simplify data visibility and access. Moreover, corporations will use a variety of public clouds, each one selected to help solve specific business problems, thereby creating a multi-cloud data management problem. In addition, the emergence of edge computing will further drive decentralization as corporations choose to deploy IT resources "near" the edge devices they manage. These trends all help to create a new and extreme "cloud data silos" scenario, that can only be addressed by solutions that provide global data visibility across these distributed clouds and data centers.

Digital Transformation / Multi-Protocol:

Multi-Protocol systems will be embraced during digital transformation: Customers transforming from legacy applications to cloud native applications will continue to embrace RESTful protocols as their standard mechanism for accessing data storage services and systems. Systems that are multi-protocol (legacy protocols such as NFS and SMB for file access plus new RESTful APIs such as AWS S3 and Azure Blob Storage for object style access) will be adopted to help companies transition during this phase. Moreover, object storage services and systems will become a standard solution for stateful container storage. 

Infrastructure application will be deployed on Kubernetes, including storage: 

Kubernetes will be the default platform for infrastructure deployment in the data center: as enterprises transform and adopt cloud-native applications, the need for a standard deployment and orchestration framework for containers will increase, just as it did during the Virtual Machine (VM) wave over the course of the last two decades. Kubernetes will be that standard orchestration platform, not only for applications deployed in containers, but also for infrastructure elements built as services and microservices. This will extend to data storage and data management infrastructure deployed on Kubernetes.

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About the Author

Paul Speciale leads Product Management for Scality, where he is responsible for defining RING functionality, solutions and roadmaps. Before Scality, he was fortunate to have been part of several exciting cloud computing and early-stage storage companies, including Appcara, where he was focused on cloud application automation solutions; Q-layer, one of the first cloud orchestration companies (the last company acquired by Sun Microsystems); and Savvis, where he led the launch of the Savvis VPDC cloud service. In the storage space, Paul was VP of Products for Amplidata focused on object storage, and Agami Systems, building scalable, high-performance NAS solutions. Paul has over 20 years of industry experience that spans both Fortune 500 companies such as IBM (twice) and Oracle, as well as venture-funded startups, and has been a speaker and panelist at many industry conferences.