2014 Storage Industry Predictions From Gridstore CEO

Data continues to grow exponentially and a plethora of storage innovations have hit the market.

With the variety of technologies and marketing messages, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to evaluate the myriad of product choices and make strategic purchasing decisions.

George Symons, CEO, Gridstore, Inc., in software-defined storage (SDS) optimized for Windows Server with Hyper-V forecasts five key trends that will have a significant impact on the storage technologies customers will consider in 2014.

1. SDS comes of age

Moves from nebulous buzz word to reality though a clear definition – this will not be universally accepted across the industry
Real SDS is all about intelligent management of the data and understanding and managing both the data on the server and the storage

2. Major escalation in adoption of Windows Hyper-V

Ease of migration/ease-of-use
Functionality meets needs of most use cases
Performance is excellent
Lower cost

3. Hybrid storage will be faster growing than pure flash

Flash as a cache will become the standard for cost effective performance
Flash technology will improve to provide 2-3x the lifetime of the flash
This will be the last year of consolidation for pure flash vendors

4. Application performance in virtualized environments continues as top priority

Customers cannot continue to over provision and pay too much to make applications perform
Vendors that can provide cost effective, scalable solutions that perform well will make significant gains
Technologies such as QoS for storage will become mandatory

5. Scale-as-you-grow expands in importance

Critical as the market moves to public and private clouds
Lowers cost of acquisition and overall TCO
Winning solutions will be scale-out vs. scale-up
Winning solutions will not be limited by clustering

SDS solution Gridstore 3.0, was purpose-built to address the architectural disconnect between traditional storage and virtualization. The product solves a critical issue – the degraded performance caused by traditional storage in a Windows Server Hyper-V environment. It accelerates Hyper-V applications by up to 500%, while offering an affordable pay-as-you-scale pricing structure.