Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022. Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
5 Storage Trends and Best Practices for 2022
By Tim Sherbak, Product and Solutions Marketing Manager, Quantum
As IT budgets lag data growth rates, pressure continues to rise for organizations to identify creative ways to cost-effectively store, manage, and extract value from data. As companies begin their search, I believe we will see a number of key trends and best practices evolve relating to data storage and management.
Cold storage heats up: With the growth of high-performance access and simpler cost models that allow for more effective storage and use of cold data sets, the line between cold and warm data is becoming blurred. Although modern cold storage archives were pioneered by some of the world’s largest cloud solution providers, we’re seeing an emerging trend in which architectures and services and cold storage solutions are being deployed within an organization’s own data center, colocation facility or hosted IT environment. This way, data can now be maintained within in-house security perimeters to meet data sovereignty and data residency requirements.
Additionally, new erasure coding algorithms optimized specifically for cold storage will enhance data protection and durability for long term retention, while also reducing storage costs significantly — as opposed to multi-copy and cloud-based solutions.
Tape becomes cool again: Instead of viewing tape solely as an offline resource in offsite storage facilities, large enterprises, cloud-scale solution providers, research facilities, and government agencies will all be turning to online, tape-based accessible archives. While DNA storage continues to make strides as a promising area of research, tape will continue to prevail not just for the coming year, but for the next decade.
This is largely due to its technological maturity, continued low-cost leadership, ultra-low power consumption, and long-term durability. Architectures based on RAIL (Redundant Array of Independent Libraries) were long considered the Holy Grail of large-scale tape deployments, but now, will have finally hit their stride due to advances in multi-dimensional erasure coding technologies. This is because these architectures are optimized for tape library characteristics, which simultaneously maximizes performance, durability, and storage efficiency. High performance recovery of tape-based data will also enable organizations to cost-effectively expand the application of artificial intelligence, deep learning and other complex analyses, due to its simplified staging and recovery of tape-based data sets for model recalibration, re-analysis and data re-use.
Secondary storage tiers for unstructured data: To ensure data can live long-term, archived, and remain accessible and protected, technology providers must continue to innovate and re-invent themselves. They can do this by enabling an efficient workflow in the secondary storage tier, keeping the technology easy to deploy and easy to operate. It’s important to note that this lower-cost tier will also help enhance application performance, due to how it frees up the primary storage tier.
Securing unstructured data with backup and archiving: Unstructured data such as non-entertainment, surveillance, and video is ninety percent of the data in the world today, and is what makes the difference in any business, it is their lifeline, and it has a lifecycle. And as ransomware threats continue to increase, unstructured data will become more vulnerable to cyber-attacks, as oftentimes, data is what is driving cyber criminals to increase their relentless attacks — they understand its value.
The analysis, security, and storage of data, and moving it seamlessly across the infrastructure, will be a top priority for many organizations. Organizations must understand their data lifecycle and gain insight to effectively manage and utilize technology including secondary storage tier technology that can protect it from cyber-threats to preserve it for many years, decades, maybe even centuries.
Offline storage: Tape will increase its presence as an attractive option for offline storage. Offline storage for long-term archive will continue to increase its presence, more so in hyperscalers (if users continue to see the cloud as a “send all” data bucket) than on-prem enterprises. Though, offline storage will be a very cost-effective pairing to cloud when leveraged on prem for ransomware recovery.
In 2022, we should be seeing more companies not only utilizing their data, but having a better understanding of what it all means. It’s critical that companies take action now to revisit and revise data management strategies.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tim Sherbak is an Enterprise Product and Solutions Marketing Manager at Quantum, aligned to his passion for helping customers adopt new technologies and solutions for breakthrough results. Tim’s unique perspectives emanate from a broad range of experiences in product development, marketing, and sales across a variety of storage, systems, software, datacenter, and cloud technologies. Tim holds an M.S. from the MIT Sloan School and a B.S. in Information Science from Syracuse University.
