Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022. Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Demand for Lower Storage Costs, “Five-Star Safety” Data Protection, and Complete Hardware Flexibility
By Gal Naor, CEO and Co-Founder, StorONE
1. Minimum Price Per IOPS and TB – In 2022 and beyond, the price of storage solutions will be of high importance in general, and specifically, the cost of cloud-based solutions. As inflation rises, enterprise storage users will need to reduce expenses. In addition, cloud storage pricing has increased dramatically compared to on-premises solutions.
90% of spec utilization – The only way to substantially reduce the cost of storage is by taking advantage of more efficient software that extracts significantly more performance and capacity utilization. Storage software that achieves 90% capacity and performance utilization dramatically lowers the hardware requirement for all use cases. The same is valid for cloud installations, as using fewer drives and lower-priced compute instances will significantly reduce the overall cost of the solution.
2. “Five-Star Safety” rating will be the deciding factor for most storage purchases and any new storage system will have to meet the highest data protection standards. Concerns over suffering data loss in general and Ransomware, in particular, will cause customers to demand superior data protection capabilities. Five Star Safety has become mandatory when purchasing cars, so it will also be in the storage industry. In 2022, data protection will become an even more crucial issue when purchasing a storage system, and customers will demand superior solutions. Customers will demand integrated and comprehensive data solutions include storage’s “Five-Star safety”:
- Data Integrity – Direct write to drive
- Data Protection – Any amount of drives failure per volume
- Data Retention – Immutable and unlimited snapshots
- Data Replication – Multi site replication
- Data Encryption – Volume level encryption
3. Complete Hardware Flexibility – Analysts expect 2021’s hardware shortage to worsen during the first six months of 2022. These shortages will dramatically affect pricing and delivery times and it also highlights the difficulties with depending on pinpointed hardware solutions. More than that, customers want the ability to mix and match drives of different sizes and manufacturers on the same volume.
In addition, the exponential increase in the amount of data stored makes migrations an impossible task, further exacerbating the need for flexibility. A system that does not require migrations to replace the drives or controllers is essential in 2022(similar to VMware solutions and any smartphone replacement).
- 100% software-based solutions that are hardware-agnostic provide the ability to mix drive types at the same volume and to use the same drives for all protocols without adding new storage systems.
- Use of auto-tiering technology that can combine two types of drives – Flash and HDD – in the same volume and providing a more effective total cost of ownership.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gal Naor is the CEO of StorONE. Prior to co-founding the company, he introduced the first real-time enterprise storage compression technology in 2004 while at StorWize (acquired by IBM) and changed the utilization and pricing paradigm of commercial storage drives.
