Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2016. Read them in this 8th Annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Mark Weiner, CEO, Reduxio
Three Key Storage Trends in 2016
At Reduxio, we don’t pretend to have a crystal ball that allows us to see into the future (if you find one, let us know). However, we are seeing three major trends that we think are shaking up the enterprise data storage market, and creating opportunities for companies, like ours, that use the latest advancements in processing, networking and media technology to rethink the way storage is architected and built from the ground up.
Customer adoption of performance optimized storage
Server virtualization, more powerful servers and an increasing number of enterprise applications will continue to drive higher IO requirements in the datacenter. The gap in the ability of storage systems based on architectures originally designed for spinning disks to meet these higher performance requirements will continue to grow.
Because all-flash storage systems with homogenous flash media are still too expensive to serve as a solution to for every enterprise application workload, enterprises will increasingly turn to performance optimized storage solutions that use a combination of multiple media types to deliver cost-effective performance. In particular, architectures with flash-first architectures (those that service all application read and write from flash) will become the primary choice of customers who want cost-effective high performance storage that handle their workloads and support their enterprise applications.
Growing demand for an alternative to data snapshots
As the number of volumes and the amount of data in the datacenter increases, IT departments are spending more time scheduling, managing and administering data snapshots and consistency groups. Increasing adoption of Virtual Volumes (VVols) will make this problem worse.
Moreover, as enterprises roll-out more mission-critical, web, mobile and other digital services, they are finding that snapshot based systems cannot recover data or applications with sufficient granularity when there are data errors or logical corruptions.
Enterprises seeking to implement faster and more agile application development are finding that snapshots are an inefficient method for quickly creating clones of entire IT environments for development and testing.
All these factors will lead enterprises to seek alternatives to snapshots that are simpler and easier to manage, and will allow data and application recovery to a second before the data error or logical corruption occurred, and that can be used to quickly create chains to independent clones for DevOps teams.
The shift from Fibre Channel to Ethernet will accelerate
In the past, Fibre Channel’s speed advantage made it the standard for enterprise storage networking. However, with the wide spread deployment of 10Gbe Ethernet and the transition to 40Gbe the speed advantage of Fibre Channel over Ethernet has evaporated.
Ethernet,’s speed and cost advantage along with that fact that Ethernet is backed by Cisco and the other major companies in the networking space, will lead more enterprises to integrate Ethernet into their enterprise storage architectures.
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About the Author
Mark Weiner is responsible for the overall strategy and execution of Reduxio. Mark is a veteran of the storage industry, with over 20 years of experience in technical, sales and executive roles. Prior to joining Reduxio he served as CEO at Exanet, a Clustered NAS vendor, growing its sales, and leading to its eventual acquisition by Dell.
