Storage Predictions for 2019 by StorageNewsletter.com – Part Two

Block Storage
Block storage means full flash, hybrid and full HDD. The battle will continue with more density per drive or board, NVMe connectivity and NVMeF-based fabric. We also anticipate that 1PB/U will become even more more common with the density going up meaning that 100PB will be approximately 2 full racks and potentially less. The key point to consider is the data services offered by the array – physical or virtual one – and we see real differences between products generations. Vendors to watch in 2019: Datera, E8, Infinidat, Pure Storage and Vexata.

File Storage
For a few years now, this category has revealed new players and new approaches for specific use cases or very generic ones. It confirms also that approaches like object API finally failed to replace file interfaces like NAS or even ‘local’ access for the obvious reason: there is no integration as applications talk natively files. We identify performance, capacity and multi-cloud capabilities. Check the recent article of file storage for cloud providers and the article we wrote about Gartner Magic Quadrant for Distributed File System and Object Storage. Vendors to watch in 2019: Quobyte, Qumulo, Rozo and Weka.IO.

Object Storage and S3
This category is dead, we’re a bit provocative but it was never a real market but more a technology answer as file serving had limitations in capacity and access methods. In other words, the explosion of unstructured data pushed the industry to invent a new model and it was object storage. This abrupt remark is motivated by the fact that S3 is everywhere and eats everything. Cloud storage is the preferred model. Two players – Cloudian and Scality – thought as leaders continued to raise money after almost a decade of existence. Minio and Ceph, open source object storage, are adopted and deployed and file storage is back for a few years now. More and more applications are leveraging S3, directly from the cloud, perfectly illustrated by Snowflake, a reference in the cloud data warehouse landscape. Vendors to watch in 2019: Cloudian and Minio.

SDS and HCI
Buzz words but real solutions, Software-defined storage (SDS) is represented by several categories listed above such block, file and object storage, leveraging commodity hardware with standard components to offer cost effective solutions and good enough performance for many uses cases. It also covers some data management products, hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) and multi-protocol data servers. Vendors to watch in 2019: Hedvig, StorONE and Datrium.

Data Management
Pretty big category as some topics are really tied together. In data protection, newcomers have shaken established positions with new approaches and rapid support of virtualization, container and cloud. Vendors to watch in 2019: Cohesity, HYCU, Rubrik.

In 2018 and a bit before, an interesting new backup category has emerged, the backup of SaaS applications and as of today we reference at least 25 vendors listed in this article last December. Vendors to watch in 2019: Druva, Kaseya, Odaseva and OwnBackup.

For archiving, we anticipate more adoption of cloud-based solution such AWS S3 Glacier, Google Nearline and Coldline and Azure Archive Storage.

As a recent differentiator and need, GDPR will drive new practices in data management and governance.

Tiering and metadata control continues to be an attractive function with the deluge of data we live for many years now. And tiering to the cloud is now a must. Vendors to watch in 2019: Hammerspace, Igneous, Komprise and StrongBox Data.

And we add in this group the persistent storage for container that became a few quarters a must have when you deploy such environments. Several approaches exist on the market and we’ll some M&As here in 2019. Vendor to watch in 2019: Portworx.

Secondary Storage
It’s everywhere, within a box, in the same datacenter or remotely deployed even considered at a cloud provider, secondary storage is a storage companion we live with for decades. In fact, it is natively associated with capacity and the notion of protection, it started with tape or later optical long time ago but more recently it was VTL if some of you remember, HDD arrays, HDD file servers, object storage or cloud storage at cloud storage providers. Vendors to watch in 2019: of course AWS, Google and Azure, but also Backblaze or Spectra Logic and project like Microsoft Pelican.

Composable Infrastructure
Last comer in the IT technology journey, composable infrastructure has started to deliver some interesting solutions during the past few quarters and maturity continue to happen with more and more supported components. It will be for sure a category to follow carefully as new players try to convert their tries and established vendors wish to limit their server/storage erosion against the cloud promoting similar approaches Internet giants have adopted for long time. Vendors to watch in 2019: DriveScale and Liqid.

5G
The progressive arrival of faster 5G for networks will help the processing of higher volume of storage.

Read also:
Storage Predictions for 2018 by StorageNewsletter.com
No revolution, just enhancements, with software taking over hardware
By Jean Jacques Maleval and Philippe Nicolas| 2018.01.01 | News