2016 Storage Predictions from Active Archive Alliance

Active Archive Alliance revealed its 2016 storage industry predictions for next year.
 
The Move to Hybrid Cloud
Due to limited capabilities and increased risk within the public cloud, many organizations are integrating the private cloud within their computing architectures to form stable and efficient hybrid cloud systems. cloud data centers are consistently targeted and intermittently attacked by malware and hackers, making them the most threatened data centers. With the hybrid cloud, organizations can effortlessly adjust their public cloud resources to accommodate changes while they maintaining sensitive information within their private infrastructures.

Increased Prevalence of Active Archives
The declining price of HDD drives and tape systems are making storage options more affordable and will allow for more organizations to implement archive actives. This coincides with a desire for better business insight with analytics using larger data sets and modeling to accelerate time to results. Data is becoming more valuable as the use of analytics increases and businesses want to use historical data to make better decisions. Active archiving with unified data across multiple tiers of storage allows businesses faster access to data, better insights and the ability to make more informed decisions.

Seamless Storage Management Regardless of Technology
New software abstracts flash, disk, tape and cloud into simple, easy to use storage that works within current user behavior (no special or custom integration required). This intelligence will blur the line between performance storage and cost effective capacity storage and it will make tape and cloud as easy to use as the current c: drive.  It will also reduce backup or even eliminate backup for fixed content. Archive copies will become the new standard and intelligent storage management will automatically provide data protection (numbers of copies, self-healing function) both for local and off-site copies. It will also know when to store the data flash for performance, tape/cloud for resiliency and cost effective storage.
 
End to Vendor Lock-in
There will be a move away from proprietary solutions that create vendor lock-in and lock-up user data with vendor dependency, i.e. silo solutions or proprietary software and hardware. As we keep data longer or even forever, we will need solutions that are flexible, vendor neutral, support completely open formats and ensure that data can be accessible now and in the future.
 
Expanded Role for Advanced Data Tape in Active Archive Environments
With organizations seeking to keep access to all of their data and content indefinitely, new innovations in tape technology will make this possible and affordable in an active archive environment. Increased capacity coming from LTO-7 now at 15TB compressed will help reduce TCO and boost performance with a transfer speed of 750MB/s. The newly extended LTO roadmap to generation 10 will allow organizations to leverage investments already made in LTO systems and continue to migrate archived content well into the future. Finally, tape’s role will continue to grow as a seamless part of the storage infrastructure and the cloud as it becomes easier to use as a file and object storage solution due to LTFS.

Increased Use of Object Storage
Companies will increasingly expand their active archives using object-based storage over file or block storage. Object storage systems allow relatively inexpensive, scalable and durable retention of massive amounts of unstructured data. With object storage, there is no file system hierarchy. The architecture of the platform allows the data pool to scale virtually to an unlimited size, while keeping the system simple to manage. The efficiency of object storage makes massively scalable active data archives affordable.

The following Active Archive Alliance members contributed to this list: Crossroads Systems, Inc., DataDirect Networks Inc., Fujifilm Recording Media, Inc., Spectra Logic Corp..