What’s in Store for Storage in 2016 ?

This article, What’s in Store for Storage in 2016, was written by Bassam Tabbara, CTO of Quantum Corp. since last September, after joining the company in August 2014 as part of its acquisition of Symform’s cloud platform where served as CTO and co-founder.

Object Storage: Ready for its Close-Up
Sensor based data – combined with new, sophisticated tools for analyzing buyer behavior – are driving enterprise IT departments to retain increasing capacities of historical unstructured data to allow their users to assess the present in the context of the past. Businesses have reached the tipping point where traditional storage methods can’t support the resulting high capacity workloads. Object storage, with its online scalability and robustness, is the answer. Object storage has been in use for some time in major cloud service providers, but the technology is seeing traction with commercial enterprises now because it can scale to meet the capacity needs of massive data sets while keeping data at the ready. The unrelenting growth of unstructured data, together with lengthening RAID re-build times on high-capacity disks, is finally pushing enterprises into using object storage to extend online access to data in multi-petabyte, non-block storage.

Video: Just Can’t Get Enough – or Keep Up with Growth
Even as video has become a predominant part of our everyday lives, we haven’t seen anything yet (pun intended). According to a Cisco study, by 2019, video traffic will be 80% of all consumer internet traffic in 2019, up from 64% in 2014, and nearly a million minutes of video content will cross I.P. networks every second. This goes beyond individuals creating and sending their own videos. Use of video in marketing is growing rapidly. As an example, U.S. digital video advertising spending is expected to increase from approximately $6 billion in 2014 to more than $14 billion in 2019, a 20% CAGR. Other contributors to the explosion in video include expanded surveillance activities mentioned above and growth in corporate video (e.g., for training). At the same time, video files – already huge – are getting even larger as resolutions increase and being stored for longer periods of time. In 2016, all of this will further highlight the growing gap between workflow-optimized storage solutions that can keep up with greater performance, capacity and access demands and more general solutions that can’t.

Smarter, Sharper Cameras: Point, Click, Shoot and Prepare for Data Onslaught
Sophisticated video surveillance is no longer exclusive to homeland security. Universities, municipalities, schools and commercial enterprises are adopting cameras with more sensors, wider panoramas and higher resolution than ever before. And, these organizations are seeking out surveillance capabilities – compression, streaming, storage, analytics – built into the cameras themselves for better value. The more rapid-than-anticipated adoption of HD cameras means that prices will continue to fall and more organizations will make the switch from analogue and SD cameras. In 2016, we’ll see a spike in camera counts – with HD cameras seeing the biggest jump – leading to an exponential leap in video data to manage.

Body-Worn Cameras: No Debating the Storage Challenges
We saw plenty of pilot projects for body-worn camera (BWC) deployments in 2015, primarily driven by the federal funding made available to help departments purchase them. In 2016, we’ll see even more BWC adoption and increased retention times for footage as departments realize their value for evidence and public safety. As more analytics capabilities move into the cameras themselves, network video recording quality will suffer without a sound storage strategy. While many law enforcement departments and agencies are still struggling with the managing these massive new  data sets, we’re starting to see a better understanding of the storage infrastructure required to support BWC deployments. That learning will continue next year as government and law enforcement IT managers share best practices with one another on how to manage the rising tide of BWC-generated data.

Surveillance: Beyond Crime Prevention to Business Intelligence
In 2016, the private sector and government alike will continue getting wise to the fact that video surveillance information is useful not just for security but for  powering tomorrow’s business decisions. We’ll see more examples next year of organizations that have successfully monetized video surveillance data. From retail to shipping and logistics, more companies will discover the wealth hidden in their video data to do things like tighten supply chains and keep shelves stocked. Bringing together massive data sets of disparate file types into a common analytics engine will require a thoughtful storage architecture.

“Archive as a Service” Finds a Home for Compliance Data – In the Cloud
2015 was the year when cloud service providers – like Google and AWS – offered more (and less expensive) options for storing long term data in the cloud. A mass of vendors also offered gateways to help customers move their data off premise. But customers made their preferences known. They do not want piece part answers. Particularly for compliance data, they want full outsourced solutions that simply remove the problem of archiving from the To Do list. 2016 will be the year these solutions arrive, with a major migration of customer compliance and “write once, hope to read never” data to the cloud.

Two Clouds are Better than One
Moving data to the cloud definitely eliminates the challenges entailed in managing data onsite, and whether it’s the appeal of “archive as a service” mentioned above or some other driver, public cloud adoption will continue to grow rapidly in 2016. As more and more data moves to the cloud, however, expect to see another trend accelerate – a dual-cloud vendor policy. Just as many enterprises maintain at least two sources for critical infrastructure components to avoid vendor lock-in and the loss of flexibility this entails, companies are increasingly recognizing the need to extend this approach to the cloud services they buy.

When the Public Cloud is Not Enough
If over half of all enterprises are to adopt a hybrid cloud model by 2017 (as Gartner predicted last year) more organizations will be wrestling over where their data is stored. And, while public cloud is often touted as a more scalable and cost-effective storage solution than on-premise, the economics don’t always make sense depending upon the data to be stored and performance needed. The media and entertainment industry has been dealing with this issue for years, as production houses often need to move massive video data sets quickly across disparate locations and recalling data from a public cloud would be far too expensive and time-consuming. In 2016, as more enterprise IT departments wrestle with massive data workloads generated from corporate video marketing, virtualization and the Internet of Things, they will also turn to on-prem cloud storage to get the job done quickly and on-budget.

Open Source Goes Mainstream
Commercial enterprises have historically viewed open source solutions from a wary distance, as not ready for prime time or – in some cases – even dark and illicit. And for many years, this viewpoint was largely justified – proprietary offerings were generally superior (although not always). As we move into 2016, however, that’s no longer the case. Open source is now a viable alternative, good enough for meeting enterprise needs, and often even better at doing so. In addition, open source doesn’t involve the same level of vendor lock-in and generally makes everything more accessible. When it comes to storage, all of this will lead more and more enterprises to turn to open source solutions in the coming year.