6 storage trends to monitor

Traditionally stored in a database, new technologies produce new formats such as sensor data, video sequences and many other types of unstructured data. This rapid development is going to have a huge impact both on the storage market in general, but also on the way companies will have to manage their data in the future. Decision-makers and IT managers need to start planning for the future

1. Standardize management

The main goal should be to introduce as much standardization as possible. For example, organizations should seek to centralize the administration of existing storage systems, ideally through a single management interface to facilitate the sorting, control and use of these amounts of data.

2. Hybrid storage and prioritization systems

Many companies want (or need) to diversify their storage means, locally and on cloud-type platforms. Indeed, wherever rapid access to large amounts of data is required, local provision of SAN or other storage systems remains essential. However, it’s also great that you can store less frequently used data in the cloud for backup and archival purposes. To optimize the way storage is allocated, prioritization mechanisms are used that automatically define where data should be stored.

3. Artificial intelligence powered by fast storage

Another trend that could have a profound influence on storage solutions is the rise of artificial intelligence. This is where large amounts of data come into play, especially during the learning phase. During this phase, the data is examined for some of its characteristics by the AI ​​system.Where GPU-based computing systems are used, the rapid exchange between the AI ​​and the underlying storage unit plays a decisive role. Ultimately, the same recipes apply here: finding the right compromise between on-premises and cloud storage systems.

4. Local data centers for faster connection

Cloud providers increasingly recognize that they need to provide the best possible access to business infrastructure. Thus, new data centers, such as those of Microsoft or Amazon, are built closer to their users, in order to eliminate, or at least limit, the problems of connection to servers placed in the cloud. This also applies to smaller hosts, often more decentralized and regional than those of Azure or AWS. In these examples, a strong internet connection is required, but it can be achieved more easily using smaller, more local data centers. This type of regional supplier then represents a good compromise in terms of cost and performance. These regional providers can often serve as high-speed connection points to public clouds to deliver multicloud solutions.

5. Backup and recovery solutions must meet the requirements

The constant increase in the amount of data also impacts backups and restores: it is obvious that recovering petabytes of lost data is much more difficult to achieve than that of a gigabyte or a terabyte. This is also true for archiving large amounts of data, although this is naturally less time critical than for a restore. Therefore, some advancements such as smart indexing or metadata storage play a crucial role. Thus, unstructured data, such as video files, should be as easy to locate as possible.

6. High performance computing is coming to midsize businesses

In the past, high-performance computing was almost exclusively reserved for universities and public data centers. In the future, even medium-sized companies will no longer be able to do without HPC-type solutions because the amount of data they will generate will require significant computing resources in order to be processed efficiently.

As the volume of data increases, HPC-type processing facilities are needed especially where compute-intensive and storage-intensive simulation applications are used. Take the example of a large engineering office carrying out complex calculations which require local and high-performance computing resources for the visualization of 3D objects. Without an HPC type environment, the processing time of such volumes of data would be extremely long or simply impossible to achieve.

What is the next step ?

Storage has already undergone significant changes, but there is still a lot to come. These new advancements include Object storage for improved indexing and metadata allocation, and “memory” class storage for faster, low latency access, using smarter prioritization mechanisms.

In addition, flash technology in the form of SSD components will continue to assert itself until sooner or later supplant the classic hard drive in the business environment.