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Since the launch of the first RAID (redundant Array of Independent disks) in 1978, the storage system has been developed for nearly 40 years. According to the different characteristics of storage in different periods, we divide the development of open system storage into five stages. Next, we will talk about the evolution and characteristics of five generations of storage.

The Evolution of five generations of Storage

First Generation Storage: DAS (Direct-Attached Storage) Open system Direct attached Storage

Before the 1990s, internal and external storage devices were mainly directly connected to the host. The former external storage system is mainly connected to the host through SCSI, SAS, FC and other protocols. For a small number of hosts, using an external directly connected storage system is easy to connect, easy to configure and manage, and low cost.

However, this connection mode is not conducive to the full use of storage resources and data sharing among hosts, and can not achieve centralized management and scheduling in the management and maintenance of storage systems.

Generation storage: SAN (Storage Area Network) and NAS (Network Attached Storage) share network storage

After the 1990s, in order to solve the problems of external storage sharing, NAS and SAN network storage began to appear. NAS usually refers to the shared network storage that provides file storage services for users, supporting protocols such as NFS, SMB/CIFS and so on.

SAN storage can be divided into two types: FC (Fiber Channel) SAN storage and IP (iSCSI protocol) SAN storage, which can provide users with block services and support protocols such as FC and iSCSI. The interface bandwidth rate of FC SAN has developed from 2Gb, 4Gb and 8Gb in the early days to now 16Gb and 32GbMagneIP SAN. With the increase of network rate, the interface bandwidth rate has also developed from gigabit to 10 gigabit to higher bandwidth such as 25Gb, 40Gb and 100Gb.

NAS and SAN share network storage, which greatly improves the efficiency of storage resources, unified centralized management mode reduces the cost of storage operation and maintenance, and provides rich enterprise storage solutions.

The third generation of storage: unified storage

As the name implies, the main purpose of unified storage is convergence and integration. In short, it supports not only file-based NAS storage, including file protocol types such as SMB/CIFS and NFS, but also block-based SAN storage, including FC, iSCSI and other access protocols, and can be managed by a unified interface.

With the rapid development of virtualization technology and the explosive growth of unstructured data, users have put forward higher requirements for the rapid adaptability of infrastructure, flexible scalability and support for different types of applications. Unified storage is favored by customers because it can provide unified hardware architecture, integrated software and operation and maintenance system. Unified storage can be said to be the standard product line of all storage suppliers.

The fourth Generation Storage: flash-based Storage system

While the storage system is optimized at the front end, with the rapid development of computing, it puts forward higher requirements for storage performance. Since 2008, some storage suppliers have tried to use flash media to replace some disk media to provide higher performance, but because of the high price of flash media, flash media is mainly used in high-end storage systems. With the function of dynamic layering software, the data heat is analyzed and policies are set to automatically put the right data on the right storage media at the right time. Storage systems that configure both flash and disk media are often referred to as hybrid arrays, which effectively reduce costs while improving performance.

Around 2010, all-flash arrays began to appear, the storage system is all equipped with flash media, and the software stack of the storage system is specifically optimized for flash media, which is mainly SAS solid-state drives and Flash NAND modules.

With the development of technology, the storage system software stack gradually extends all the advanced functions for disks to flash media, and develops many new functions according to the characteristics of flash media, such as deduplication, compression, etc., which increases the effective capacity of flash media, and the price of flash media decreases year by year. It can be said that the price of flash media per GB effective capacity is roughly the same as that of SAS disks per GB.

According to IDC statistics, in 2018, all-flash systems accounted for 33.5%, hybrid arrays accounted for 41.6%, and almost 3/4 of storage systems were flash-based storage systems.

Fifth Generation Storage: enterprise Intelligent Storage in the Future

With the rapid development of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, Internet of things, 5G, and the demand for infrastructure in a multi-cloud environment, enterprise-class storage has been re-set to a new level of performance and efficiency, with a variety of advanced features and data services required by enterprise mission-critical applications, including security, availability, scalability, ease of use, and agility.

In the future, enterprise-class intelligent storage will adopt end-to-end NVMe Flash architecture, while effectively using SCM (Storage Class Memory) to optimize the overall performance of the storage system and reduce latency. The storage system software stack will be embedded with artificial intelligence suite (built-in machine learning engine), so as to achieve intelligent operation and maintenance. It will build a rich API ecology and seamlessly connect the multi-cloud environment.

Characteristics of the fifth generation of storage

The fifth generation storage is the inevitable outcome of the digital economy era, and it is the future enterprise intelligent storage for multi-cloud architecture, artificial intelligence, Internet of things and 5G and other emerging technologies. It has the characteristics of lossless effective capacity, real-time response, seamless cloud access, security and reliability, and intelligent management.

Features: agile highway

In the environment of excess information, users have gradually lost their tolerance for delay. Multi-second delay will make enterprises lose tens of thousands of users, and may directly affect their survival. Recently, the processing power of computing systems has become stronger and stronger, and the computing time required for tasks is getting shorter and shorter. therefore, the performance of storage systems has become the key to achieve fast response and agility and efficiency.

All-flash array (AFA) based on SAS flash memory can no longer meet the needs of higher density mixed workload consolidation and digital transformation innovative applications with low latency. In order to achieve low latency, maximize performance and effectively reduce IO/$ costs, the fifth generation storage supports end-to-end NVMe architecture at the hardware architecture level, that is, the back end supports NVMe Flash media, and the front end supports NVMe Over Fabric interface. Internal adaptive memory SCM (Storage Class Memory), the storage software stack is comprehensively optimized for NVMe Flash, eliminating single point bottlenecks (such as SAS protocol restrictions, etc.), and optimizing the overall architecture, so as to achieve fast and real-time response to applications, maximize users' mining and analysis of data value, and support business transformation.

Characteristics: effective capacity

In addition to the demand for agile and high speed, with the rapid development of cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence and the Internet of things, the total amount of data shows a massive explosive growth. IDC predicts that by 2025, the total amount of global data will increase from 33ZB in 2018 to 175ZB, with a compound annual growth rate of 61%.

The fifth generation storage can provide on-line real-time weight reduction and compression. While achieving high data reduction rate, it must have lossless performance and complete functions. For users, through the data reduction technology, we can reduce the actual amount of data, reduce the number of drives, and save the transmission bandwidth between data centers, thus reducing costs. In addition, due to the efficient utilization of storage resources, it can reduce the consumption of power and cooling resources and the occupation of data center space and resources, reduce the storage infrastructure TCO and achieve green environmental protection and sustainable development.

Feature 3: full stack Yunlian

The fifth generation storage must be a storage system ready in a multi-cloud environment, with good scalability, ease of use, flexible deployment, agility and flexibility.

Feature 4: data escort

As the core asset of enterprises in the digital age, data is the driving force that drives the development of enterprises, and the security and reliability of data is the foundation. Today's enterprises not only need comprehensive data protection solutions, but also need storage systems to provide sufficient performance and optimized management to meet the challenges brought by data growth while ensuring data security and reliability. Of course, availability, reliability, and ensuring that data is not lost are the primary features of the storage system at any time.

Feature 5: AI enabling

Compared with the hierarchical technology of the fourth generation storage, the fifth generation storage is not only a simple data movement between different storage media, but also can meet the needs of users in real time and automatically according to the rapidly changing application needs. In order to achieve the goal of automating storage operation and maintenance management, the fifth generation storage system integrates with various workflow automation tools by providing open API to ensure the wide support for open tool ecosystem to realize intelligent operation and maintenance.

A few days ago, Dell Technology Group's fifth generation storage star product Dell EMC PoweStore was officially released. As the latest innovative and revolutionary fifth-generation storage product, PowerStore provides a strong data platform for the construction of new infrastructure. So what are its leading innovations and features? We will share it with you in the next article.

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