Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023. Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Count on Data as the Driver for Enterprise Resiliency
By Tony Afshary, Global VP of Products and Marketing, Pliops
No doubt that data plays a pivotal role in enterprises, as it runs
through and defines every aspect of operations and customer deliverables. As we
enter 2023, data is poised to arm enterprises with the insights and
efficiencies needed to ensure resiliency during the shifting economy.
The challenge is managing the deluge of data. Current
software architectures for business applications, combined with CPU
limitations, are limiting the ability to truly leverage data. And in fact, we
see many companies resorting to overprovision everything, which leads to
additional costs.
In 2023, data is sure to take on an even greater focus as
companies look to operate smarter, connect and service customers more
effectively and deliver more value.
1. Hardware accelerators and
offload trend will continue to increase as data centers get more power hungry. CPUs and GPUs are getting
bigger, are more power hungry and require even more cooling. The cost of these
CPU and GPU compute cores cannot justify running background tasks such as
compression and encryption, which are becoming table stakes in enterprises. By moving
these functions to offloads/accelerators, greater ROI can be achieved without
compromise.
2. NVMe
storage will get denser and denser. With QLC going mainstream and PLC
emerging, NVMe storage needs to keep up in terms of density. This goes hand in
hand with application demands for higher storage. But the need for data to be
protected at all times is not going away - and we've all heard it said that as
storage gets more dense, it gets less durable. Denser storage leads to higher blast radius
in case of a disk failure, which makes RAID for NVMe SSDs all the more
important. Other techniques like in line compression of data also become
crucial with this increased disk capacity.
3. The
ability to sort, compress and sequentialize data before it is written to a disk
will become the de-facto standard in 2023. Garbage collection on
increasingly high-capacity disks will become impractical, as it relies on behaviors
that do not scale. Data amplification will be too great of a cost to ignore.
With that said, the ability to sort, compress and sequentialize data before it
is written to a disk will become the de-facto standard moving forward into
2023.
4. Data
platforms and their infrastructure will evolve to deal with the present and
future needs of enterprises by adopting real-time data processing at economics
of scale. For enterprise business applications, user responsiveness is
a major factor that determines customer behavior, retention and loyalty. All
modern digital interactions are going to be seamless, B2B and B2C users expect
real-time responses to their requests and transactions. These digital
interactions are typically small transactions but need modern data platforms
for storing and processing billions of objects at scale.
5. The
efficiency of business operations will take center stage in 2023. The
price/performance of enterprise applications will become the critical
KPI for business. However, the general-purpose processors powering these
enterprise applications continue to fall behind price / performance
requirements. GPUs have been successfully meeting price / performance
requirements - and this encourages enterprises to increasingly look at adopting
purpose-built processors for data, security, and networking offload functions.
Will 2023 be
a watershed year for storage solutions developed to address the pressing issues
of growing data volumes and data center footprints? It certainly appears so, as the old way of managing data is not
working - and there is a strong need for a different type of solution that
extends the potential to crunch, store and move data. The drive for enterprise resiliency demands application
workload scalability with accelerated performance, higher reliability and data
protection.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tony Afshary is a veteran of the storage industry. His
career spans 25 years working in executive-level positions for companies such
as Seagate, LSI and Intel. As Global VP of Products & Marketing at Pliops,
Tony leads the company's product planning, product marketing, technical
marketing, and solutions engineering functions.