Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

In mid-December, IDC released its global enterprise storage market report for the third quarter of 2018. According to the report, the overall market is still growing, with the total capacity of shipments growing by 57.3% in the third quarter compared with the same period last year. In the minds of many people, this must be the expected result.

In the digital age, the development and application of various emerging technologies have explored more abundant ways of using data, which gives data unparalleled importance. From the initial recording and dissemination to data analysis, obtaining market insight and supporting business innovation, data, as a new core asset, is continuously bringing great practical value to us in various ways.

In the process of tapping this potential, the storage and management of data is also very important. In today's data blowout, enterprises and organizations need to constantly improve their storage capacity to support the operation of massive data-oriented applications. Therefore, we can judge that the storage market is very likely to continue to grow in the foreseeable future.

This growth is not only reflected in shipments, in order to meet the needs of the complex IT environment, a variety of storage-related emerging technologies and architectures are also emerging, bringing more diverse development trends for storage. As 2018 is coming to an end, we have taken an inventory of the hottest trends in enterprise storage this year for your reference.

Artificial intelligence technology empowers data management

Artificial intelligence (AI) needless to say, although the industry is still debating whether the "first year of AI" is 2017 or 2018, there is no doubt that AI technology has been widely used. From intelligent voice assistant, autopilot, and even pig face recognition, AI can be said to be "everywhere".

Using AI technology to optimize storage has, of course, become a major trend this year. Adding AI to the storage system can not only predict system failures and prevent losses as soon as possible, but also help administrators analyze the changes of storage performance, capacity and storage space utilization of business applications, and make expansion plans in advance; in addition, using AI to achieve intelligent and automatic data management can also effectively reduce the difficulty of operation and maintenance and improve the work efficiency of administrators. This kind of application scenario is already very common in the solutions of major storage system integrators. I believe that the application of AI in the storage field will not stop here, and we will see more innovative scenarios in the future.

Flash memory continues to power, NVMe releases flash potential

Today, flash memory has become the mainstream of the storage market. There are more and more business applications with high throughput and high performance requirements, compared with the slow mechanical hard disk has been somewhat out of date. According to the IDC report, total revenue from all-flash arrays exceeded $2.15 billion in the third quarter of 2018, an increase of 39.3% year-on-year. In addition, revenue in the hybrid flash array market increased by 16.0% year-on-year.

In addition, the adoption of NVMe protocol in flash memory has also become a major trend. As an interface specification designed for flash memory, NVMe can make full use of the low latency and parallelism of PCIe channels, as well as the parallelism of contemporary processors, platforms and applications, which greatly improves the read and write performance of SSDs and further releases the potential of flash memory.

Software-defined storage that will continue to change the data center

Building a storage system in the way of "software-defined XX" can accelerate deployment, simplify storage management, reduce operating costs, reduce the coupling between software and hardware, can select and use more general hardware more widely, and develop flexibly according to business requirements to support the rapid evolution of business. The obvious advantage of flexibility makes software-defined storage a widely recognized way of storage, and almost every storage solution vendor will provide products based on software-defined storage.

It can be predicted that in 2019, the storage industry will continue to embrace software-defined storage, and more and more enterprises will begin to evaluate and use such products, or use software-defined storage as a long-term strategy to continuously optimize data center architecture.

Cloud storage, common development with cloud computing

Whether or not to transition to cloud computing is no longer a controversial topic. With the development of the industry, cloud computing has become the norm. What enterprises need to pay more attention to is how to use the cloud well. Cloud storage provides theoretically unlimited capacity, high flexibility, high availability and other advantages, and has become one of the development trends of the global storage industry.

Of course, cloud storage also has some challenges, including data security, compliance, network latency and so on. It is believed that with the continuous improvement of relevant standards and the continuous optimization of technology, cloud storage will be gradually accepted by more enterprises. And with the continuous spread of cloud computing, enterprise storage will pay more attention to the cloud.

Internet of things applications bring new storage requirements

Internet of things technology has also developed rapidly in recent years, from smart home, security to smart city, more and more Internet of things applications appear in our field of vision. Usually, there are thousands of sensors, cameras and other edge devices in the Internet of things application system, and the amount of data generated by these devices is very large, so the storage system needs to have a large amount of storage space, high scalability and high performance.

In addition, devices located at the edge of the network also need to store data. Such storage requirements will expand the boundaries of a typical data center storage system. At the same time, because cameras and other devices are usually located in the edge environment such as cloudy and sunny outdoor environment, it also puts forward new requirements for the durability and power consumption of memory devices. At present, many upstream memory device manufacturers have launched products for edge scenarios, and this trend will continue.

Last

As mentioned earlier, the enterprise IT environment is becoming more and more complex, which puts forward more diverse requirements for storage systems. The industry trends listed above may not be comprehensive, but at least they show the exuberant creativity of the storage industry in the era of digital economy. For enterprises, they need to choose the appropriate storage mode and architecture according to their own actual business needs, establish an efficient and reliable storage system, and support the landing of enterprise digital strategy.

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