New Age Storage Revolution
The storage growth is becoming an important part of data management within an organization and it is largely influenced with social networking, internet usage, digital content, social networking and smart devices. The storage providers are pressed to match with the price commercialization adopted by businesses largely interested in investing budget friendly cloud and cut storage solutions. Over the years, there has been steep fall in prices of data storage, for example – in 2001 1GB of data storage was highly expensive at $20- however in 2011, and the costs are hardly $0.10.
The storage providers are keen to invest in Solid State Drives and Software Defined Storage along by partnering with other service providers to offer Integrated E2E Storage Solutions. This helps to them to compensate price difference and offer superior service without compromising on quality.
Today, enterprises are relying on storage solutions to minimize manual intervention and Software Defined Networks can be of great use in that manner. With automated network management these Software Defined Networks work efficiently in mitigating storage needs. It largely works by abstracting resources and offering services that can be controlled, configured and managed by software. Today you will see many companies offering software solutions, which not only aid in storage management, but also in orchestration and control through open APIS.
There is a huge demand for Solid State Drives or Flash Technology due to increasing popularity of Tablet PC marketing and smartphones, which are way faster than traditional hard disks. As a result storage providers are pressed to integrate flash technology within already-existing products through hybrid disks and this has helped to improve storage capacity and drive speeds. Storage providers are working on responsible data storage by managing the frequently accessed data in expensive flash storage and pushing the less used data into tape drives and hard disks, which are not only slow to access, but comparatively cheaper, too. Recently SanDisk Corporation has acquired SMART Storage Systems to enhance its Solid State Drive Capability and EMC has introduced their VNX2 product that easily clubs advantages of hard disks and Solid-State drives.
The storage providers are deeply influence by open source applications, which are empowering enterprises to manage and maintain their own data storage systems. All of this is being embraced by legacy vendors like Seagate. Seagate is a corporate sponsor member of Open Compute Project and Open Stack Foundation.
Enterprises are no more favoring traditional silo based storage solutions and expect service providers offering integrated infrastructure solutions to forge strong partnerships with others in the same pool. For Eg – Merger of NetApp Flexpod Solution and Cisco is a example of converged networking, computing and storage solution.
Analytics based solutions are another area of interest for storage providers. As you can see HP have already acquired Vertica and Greenplum was acquired by EMC, and they are in the process of co-developing niche specific analytics solutions.
After analysis of these trends, it can be seen that storage industry is poised for growth in the coming years. Along with managing commercialization, the brand players are also pressed to invest in R&D of cloud adoption and software driven storage and go for systematic data storage. In addition to this they need to forge partnerships to offer unhindered end to end solutions. Only service providers who offer integrated solutions by partnering with apt businesses across ecosystem can survive the competition.
