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How to look at the current trend of storage technology from Gartner's Hype Cycle and IT Market Clock research reports? in view of this problem, this article introduces the corresponding analysis and solutions in detail, hoping to help more partners who want to solve this problem to find a more simple and feasible method.

Gartner distributed the 2017 hype cycle report on storage technology. Let's take a look at some of the changes in storage technology.

Let's first look at the position of each storage technology on the curve:

Then look at the priority of each technology and the time it takes to become mainstream, the redder the CIO is, the priority should be given to it.

To see the trend, let's compare last year's curve:

There are a lot of contents in the report. I will only mention the changes in this year:

1. Compared with 2016, there are no new technologies in 2017. It shows that the hardware and software technology of storage has an aging trend. This is not a good sign.

2. In 2017, there were a total of 34 technologies, of which 20% entered the mature mainstream stage and 35% entered the early mainstream stage. Only 20% are in the emerging stage.

3. The fastest-growing emerging technologies are file analytics and cloud data backup, as well as DRaaS (Gartner says more than 400 vendors provide this service, wow), integrated backup devices, VM backup and recovery, online compression, object storage and solid-state DIMM modules.

4. However, the two high-profile technologies, managed SDS and open source storage, remain basically the same, indicating that the manufacturer's publicity has not resonated with users.

5. This year, there is a technology that cloud storage gateways were abandoned without entering the mainstream, which surprised Watermelon. Gartner said that cloud storage gateways will only be used in certain scenarios (such as requiring global namespaces and file locks) and will not become a mainstream technology. Because the role of the cloud storage gateway is a bridge between data center storage and public cloud storage. But public cloud storage has matured and has become a part of enterprise storage, and it is no longer necessary to use public cloud storage through bridges.

6. In terms of priority, administrative SDS has been reduced from high priority to medium priority. It seems that Gartner is not very optimistic about management SDS!

7. Solid-state array (SSA) has reached the mainstream deployment stage (usually the deployment rate of more than 20% enters the plateau stage), and it is estimated that it will leave this hype cycle curve next year (usually more than half of the target users will retire). These retired technologies are likely to be followed up in the IT Market Clock research report. Enterprise File sharing and synchronization Technology (EFSS) is retiring this year.

After reading the hyper cycle research report, let's take a look at the IT Market Clock research report that I previously ignored. This year's version of the report is not available. Let's take a look at the 2016 version first.

This report studies the major storage technology asset classes, which you can understand as more product-oriented than technology-oriented. For example, 27 storage technology asset classes were evaluated in 2016. These storage technology classes are evaluated in a clock interface. Evaluating the four stages of the market in terms of clockwise direction: Advantage,Choice,Cost and Replacement, is a bit like the life cycle of a product. The distance from the center of the circle is used to indicate the degree of commercialization of the technology, which is related to the degree of standardization, the number of suppliers and the difficulty of acquiring corresponding skills.

A picture is worth a thousand words, and the location of these 27 types of storage technologies can be seen at a glance from the picture above. We see that some technical categories also appear in hyper cycle, but generally appear in the right half of the clock.

Since 27 types of storage technologies are involved, I am not going to interpret them. Here I will just select the four storage forms that are most concerned about enterprise storage selection to see what advice Gartner gives you.

These four forms are Infrastructure SDS (later I call Server SAN), Hyperconvergence (HCIS), Solid-State Arrays (SSA), and High-End Storage Arrays (high-end storage). This is a question often asked by users when choosing primary storage. What scenarios use these forms?

As recommended by Gartner:

1. SSA:SSA is mature, its reliability is higher than expected, and data reduction makes it more economical than hybrid array. Act immediately and start using SSA instead of traditional disk arrays.

2. HCIS: used to calculate and store scenarios where synchronous growth can be predicted proportionally. It is recommended for branch offices, small and medium-sized infrastructure deployment.

3. Server SAN: the market is active, but there is no leader, and no product fully meets the necessary standards of SDS that Gartner believes. It is recommended to be used in scenarios where software and hardware decoupling and more business flexibility and data mobility are needed.

4. High-end storage: used in key application scenarios that require the highest level of data protection.

However, the report says that high-end storage is now in the Cost phase of the market, and it may only take 2-5 years for Replacement to reach the next stage. However, I think midrange storage is also in the Cost phase, but it is expected to take more than 10 years to reach the next stage. This implies that high-end storage will be slowly replaced (most likely by SSA) in 5 years, but mid-end storage will still exist for a long time. It seems that the high-end storage I advertised will be as contradictory as mainframes and minicomputers for a long time, but it is not contradictory either, because now high-end storage manufacturers have launched all-flash models, which are included in the SSA. That is, it is still high-end storage, but its media becomes full SSD. However, for mid-range storage, there is still a market for hybrid storage due to cost reasons, and what can replace mid-range storage in the future should be Server SAN, but it will take 5-10 years for Server SAN to become mainstream, so it will take longer.

This is the answer to the question on how to see today's storage technology trends from Gartner's Hype Cycle and IT Market Clock research reports. I hope the above content can be of some help to you. If you still have a lot of doubts to be solved, you can follow the industry information channel for more related knowledge.

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