Storage Predictions for 2016 by Vendors: IBM …

Here are the storage predictions of IBM Corp. as described by two company’s fellows, Andy Walls and Dr. Evangelos Eleftheriou.
 
Andy Walls, IBM fellow, CTO and chief architect

• Flash based storage has taken off in a flash. The $35 billion external storage market will accelerate in moving disk storage to flash in in 2016 for all active, tier one storage needs. Flash will dominate disk storage by 2019. In 2016, the rate of increase of capacity is slowing for disk drives to 12 to 15%. Customers are adopting flash for performance, ease of use and management. Flash storage is inherently fast and easy to manage. Flash storage allows for the compression and deduplication of data more efficiently. The machines are also cheaper to manage and replace; they take up less space in data centers, and require less electricity and cooling. Today, it is already cheaper to deliver a certain IO/s load on flash then disk. Flash also has a cheaper TCO then disk-based systems. As prices continue to decline for flash, more and more customers will make the move.
• 3D stacking technology is entering a third dimension. The flash memory inside our phones, tablets and SSDs is getting faster, cheaper and more capable every year, but there is a limit to how much data we can pack inside a given area of silicon, and current technology is already pushing that limit. To keep the trend going, vendors are needing to move two-dimensional memory cells in storage technology into the third dimension, which is called 3D stacking.
• Cold storage will become a hot technology in 2016. Storage vendors will step up efforts in alternative technologies for cold storage and how to make storage technology faster, cheaper and denser. High capacity, low cost and durability are important goals for cold storage. Presently, data retrieval and response time can be slower for a cold storage system than for devices or systems designed for active data. Media choices for cold storage include tape or low-cost commodity HDD drives. Object storage (Cleversafe) is one of the most common disk-based storage system types for cold data.
• Hyper convergence is moving from hype to the real thing. IBM is working on Spectrum Scale hyper-convergence software to manage both servers and storage in the same box for Citi and some other clients. Hyper-convergence is a type of infrastructure system with a software-centric architecture that tightly integrates compute, storage, networking and virtualization resources and other technologies from scratch in a hardware box supported by a single vendor, such as IBM.
• Software-defined storage will spiral upwards. While smaller businesses are increasingly moving to SaaS applications and cloud-based storage in pursuit of lower costs and greater agility, most enterprises need to pursue a hybrid strategy, retaining a significant amount of storage capacity on-premises for reasons of performance, security, regulatory compliance, cost and/or the avoidance of cloud service lock-in. Typically an enterprise will keep mission-critical data in-house, using the cloud for lower-priority data, and for coping with episodic capacity requirements that fall outside the normal run of business. In 2016, we’ll see more solutions based on software-defined scale-out storage pioneered by cloud giants such as IBM with its Spectrum Storage portfolio, to provide enterprises more flexible management capabilities.
• More companies will look to the cloud for storage needs. The storage of data online in the cloud, where a company’s data is stored and accessible from multiple distributed and connected resources will become huge in 2016. Enterprises and midmarket firms will be looking for more solutions like IBM SoftLayer to manage all of their storage needs. Storage will become an enabler to high performance cloud computing. Storage is a major component to the cloud and will continue to be a fundamental driver of performance.  

Dr. Evangelos Eleftheriou, IBM Fellow, cloud and computing infrastructure, IBM research, Zurich

•  Flash will become pervasive – Flash will expand from high-end enterprise storage to encompass big data workloads in a cost-competitive manner. Termed ‘Big Data Flash’ by IDC, this new category of storage will focus on reducing cost and increasing the effective storage capacity to serve cloud workloads that are dominated by reads and do not have stringent requirements on write performance and endurance. We expect to see more companies move towards software-defined storage systems made of low-cost Flash and commodity hardware components to store large data volumes in a cost-efficient way.
   
• Tape storage will dominate cold data – Out of the massive data deluge comes a compound aggregate data growth rate of 48%. Since 2007, available storage has been growing more slowly than the amount of data being created. Also, 80% of the files created are inactive, creating what is commonly known as cold storage. There exists an opportunity for tape in this space because of its low cost. However, what is currently missing is the ability to access tape in the same way as we access object storage through standard APIs. Storage experts at IBM will be working closely with the Openstack community to allow tape as well as other high-latency media (spin-down disk, optical libraries) to be integrated into the cloud infrastructure.
   
• Creating the SDS gateway to the cloud – Fueled by the need for seamlessly integrating mission-critical enterprise storage with the cloud, we are going to see the emergence of gateways with this capability. MCStore (Multi-Cloud Storage) is a software-defined enterprise cloud gateway invented at IBM Research that enables existing storage products to natively support public and private cloud storage, addressing customer concerns regarding security, resilience and vendor lock-in. Such capabilities will be critical for effectively realizing hybrid cloud strategies.