Matching predicted trends with reality

Earlier in the year Tegile made some predictions for the future of the storage industry, and at the year’s halfway point, would like to take a moment to review these and match them with the reality of the business environment to date.

Prediction One: Flash will continue to gain traction but won’t replace disk in the short run
“If you listen to the noise from vendors promoting all-flash storage systems triumphantly displacing disk, you might think that 2014 might be the year we truly start to see such a transition. But as great as it may sound to leverage the benefits of flash throughout the entire storage ecosystem, the reality is that scenario is nothing more than a pipe dream”.

There is a segment of the market that needs extremely high IOPS and a consistently low latency. There is and will always be a large portion of the market that needs to keep the cost of capacity in check as well. There is no need for demagoguery here – both flash and disk are valid mediums. We have already seen a number of organisations discover that all flash solutions cannot meet the price point of disk-based subsystems. All flash vendors drive the message of ‘flash at the cost of disk’ but we know that’s not possible in today’s environment because in a well architected system, data reduction technologies such as deduplication and compression can be applied to disk as well. Additionally, those who look to all flash vendors to address their data management challenges encounter integration and acquisition cost challenges in deploying separate silos of storage.

NAND vendors will, of course, continue to drive down the cost per GB of their technology but the true winners will be those that can drive software integration and data protection in a platform that balances the tension between capacity and performance.

One way to balance this tension is to deploy hybrid storage – combining the performance optimisation of flash with the capacity optimisation of disk. Because of this, in the last six months we have seen many organisations begin to break away from their incumbent storage providers to explore the new storage solutions provided by smaller start-ups.

Prediction Two: Gaps in virtualisation offerings will be filled by third-party VM-aware solutions
“Virtualisation has lived up to its billing as a truly transformative technology but there are still holes that need to be plugged before it will be universally adopted. In 2014, we’ll see some of these issues rectified as storage system vendors with VM-aware software solutions fill the gaps that haven’t been satisfactorily dealt with by incumbent virtualisation giants in their existing offerings.”

The ease of management and velocity in the data center that virtualisation brings creates a challenge for traditional storage systems that were not built for the rate of change in applications deployed on top of them, nor the interleaved IO-blender effect consolidation brings. Storage that has been architected for the management and data plane challenges of today’s data center are making solid foothold gains in enterprises across the world.

Let’s focus on the management plane. Virtualisation administrators are taking centre stage in the data centre just as DBAs have traditionally had lots of influence in database environments over the last 30 years. Most hypervisor experts are not as well versed in LUNs, file systems, RAID groups, etc. VM-Aware storage masks those storage centric objects and allows the system to be provisioned, monitored and managed in a VM granular framework. Now, storage is sliced and diced in the same manner as servers are in a virtualised stack.

Prediction Three: Hybrid storage arrays will have earned the right to sit at the grown-ups’ table
“The last few years have seen the rapid adoption of hybrid storage arrays in non-production environments, but the upcoming year will be the right time for these solutions to be properly utilised for core enterprise applications.”

The storage industry is at an inflection point regarding the best approach to satisfy the increasing needs of performance-hungry applications while staying true to the bottom line. There will always be faster and larger media, and equally voracious applications that will consume at higher speeds and bigger capacities. The industry is quickly realising that hybrid solutions are in prime position to operate within this environment as they have a stronger performance rate than traditional hard disk-based storage at significantly less cost than all solid state arrays.

So while we expect hybrid storage to continue rising in popularity, it is important that before businesses get swept up in the flash tide, they take a balanced approach, keeping specific criteria in mind that will afford them a storage solution that best addresses individual business needs. This criterion includes IOPS or performance, latency, storage capacity levels, storage functionality and cost, and should not be new to any storage architect.

Organisations looking to make the most of IT investments by adopting a hybrid approach need to find solutions that deliver faster performance, higher capacities and robust data protection with near-instant recovery times, all while being affordable, efficient and easy to use. This is not a small task, particularly as not all hybrids are created equally.

Ideally, organisations will end up with a seamless architecture that leverages flash both as a standalone media (all-flash) as well as an accelerator for other media (hybrid) – resulting in the best combination of cost per IOPS, cost per TB and latency characteristics. Organsations can choose to ignore one or more of these criteria for a narrow application; however, for storage across the entire datacentre, it is essential to choose a platform that gives you the best of all worlds.

There is still six months left in the year and it would be naive to think that nothing further will change, however, the trends we are seeing point towards the stable integration of hybrid storage into everyday storage architecture and the general maturing of the market.

The appeal of making a smarter, more efficient investment, while still reaping the business benefits is helping companies gain the vital competitive advantage in their market. This in turn is driving not just survival, but growth for the UK economy. It is promising to see that many organisations are beginning to realise that ultimately the winners in this new economic climate will be those who are able to match business requirements accurately against market solutions and make key decisions that enable them to achieve a lot with a relatively small budget. This is why 2014 is set to be the year that more users will discover how hybrid storage arrays can gain the performance benefits of solid state without sacrificing the cost benefits of hard disk storage at the right price point.