Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2021. Read them in this 13th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Five 2021 Storage Trends Every Data Center Operator Should Know
By Kam Eshghi, Chief Strategy Officer, Lightbits
Labs
According to Technavio, the data center storage market size has the
potential to grow by $126.3 billion during 2020-2024. The growth is exacerbated
by the COVID-19 pandemic, 5G and the growing proliferation of connected
devices, all of which have data centers around the world dealing with increased
data demands. All of this means the market is ripe for new storage solutions,
some of which we will see in 2021. Here are some top storage trend predictions
for 2021:
- More enterprises and Software-as-a-Service
(SaaS) providers will adopt hybrid cloud strategies, moving from pure
public cloud to a mix of public and private cloud / on-premises
infrastructure. On-prem infrastructure will reduce costs and provide
better performance and security, while cloud bursting will help expand
workloads to a public cloud on demand during spikes.
- Rising adoption of 5G and the
increase of IoT devices will push more data toward edge clouds, increasing
the amount of high performance, low-latency storage needed in edge
infrastructure.
- Ethernet speeds
continue to grow as 100GbE has commoditized and 400GbE gains market
traction. In a Network World article, The Dell'Oro
Group says demand for 400GbE from the broader market is expected to ramp
up by the end of 2020 and early 2021, but 400 GbE and higher speeds are
predicted to account for more than 25 percent of port shipments by 2024.
- More organizations will abandon fibre
channel (64GB & 128GB), as it will become increasingly
cost-prohibitive as an upgrade, enabling NVMe/TCP to be widely deployed by
cloud service providers and enterprises to deliver high-performance
storage in a simple and efficient way. All major operating systems will
provide NVMe/TCP inbox drivers for ease of deployment at scale.
- As it continues growing in popularity,
quad-level cell (QLC) drive storage prices will become even more
attractive and the industry will see more of its storage workload shift
from HDD (and TLC) toward QLC-based solutions.
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About the Author
Kam Eshghi, Chief Strategy Officer, Lightbits
Labs
Kam has over 20yrs of
experience leading strategic marketing and business development with startups
and public companies. As Chief Strategy Officer, Kam leads marketing, business
development, and solutions engineering teams at Lightbits Labs. He drives the
Lightbits product roadmap and partnerships, building Lightbits' complete
solutions around Kubernetes, Openstack, VMware, and NVMe/TCP storage with
clustering. Previously as VP of strategic alliances at startup DSSD, Kam led
business development with technology partners and developed DSSD's partnership
with EMC, leading to EMC's acquisition of DSSD. Prior to that as Sr. Director
of Marketing & Business Development at IDT, Kam built the industry's first
NVMe controller business from scratch. Previous to that Kam worked in data
center storage, compute and networking markets at HP, Intel, and Crosslayer
Networks. Kam is a U.C. Berkeley and MIT graduate with a BS and MS in
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and an MBA.