2018 Storage Predictions by Scality

These 2018 storage predictions came from Giorgio Regni, CTO, Scality, Inc.

Multi-cloud storage will gain traction driven by cloud independence, price advantages and better protection of data across clouds.

IT organisations are changing: they are becoming multi-cloud service organisations, using private and public cloud to accelerate their business. Data is a critical asset and companies must always be in control of your data.
As companies move to multi-cloud then IT will need strong controls on the data management and user management across clouds. A new data control layer will emerge which can add governance and assurance capability to the data for enterprise businesses – ensuring secure encryption, access control and rich metadata services across multi-cloud environments.

The rise of metadata

Traditionally, enterprises have stored data through NAS or SAN arrays. These technologies have been built to fit a need where the application and the data where closely integrated and generally running on the same hardware rack.
In 2017, we’ll see the rise of metadata where storage arrays store both the data itself and interesting metadata about that data. For example, Healthcare Electronic Medical Records (EMR systems), want to store with the data identifiable information like patient name, address, demographics etc. Metadata is the key to this. We will see growing usage of data management via metadata for industries such as healthcare, finance, and media and entertainment. The metadata will be indexed and searchable as part of the storage layer.

Software-defined storage will cross the threshold, as more storage capacity will be delivered as software-defined storage versus traditional storage appliances

Over the last few years, software-defined storage has been growing faster than traditional appliance-based storage. In 2018, this will finally overtake traditional storage and more capacity will be managed as software-defined storage.
The main drivers for this are maintaining an always-on system, on-demand scaling and hardware flexibility to lower cost.

Companies will take advantage of the freedom and flexibility to mix and match hardware generations and vendors, for more cost-effective procurement.

These will be the last days for the storage administrator as application-driven takes over.
DevOps is now commonplace and as companies build applications they design into those applications the ability to control the infrastructure. This will mean that the traditional storage administrator will start to disappear.
Cloud storage (in the private or public cloud) provides the API driven controls to manage data by the applications (e.g. the hugely popular Amazon S3 API) and those cloud storage offerings automate many of the previous tasks of a storage administrator.

Convergence of object storage and analytics

Today, people are adopting more object storage for their hundreds of terabytes to petabytes of storage capacity needs. Moving this data outside of the storage to be analysed is inefficient. Instead we will see analytic layers embedded into the storage technologies. Object storage vendors will take the lead in this space.

Privacy regulations like GDPR will require data to be always-on and available – the final decline and demise of the offline tape.

With GDPR, data needs to be always accessible, easily indexed and rapidly accessed. This is not possible with traditional offsite tape – the traditional bulk backup via tapes and trucks will finally disappear.