The journey of data storage: what’s next?

Intelligent infrastructure management will be key to meeting the growing demands of technology deployments and real-time data analysis. So while the industry continues to develop at a significant rate, it is safe to bet that the future of storage will be smart

Over the past twenty years, businesses have been transformed by the boom in applications. Companies now rely on hundreds – and in some cases thousands – of applications to carry out their day to day operations.
Emails have become the lifeblood of the organisation, cloud software adoption is on the increase, and e-commerce platforms are becoming an essential part of the sales process.

This has drastically changed our demand for data – with a further challenge for many companies wanting these applications constantly available across numerous devices.
To top it off, the drive for digital transformation has meant that businesses are increasingly looking to big data analytics to improve their offerings and discover new revenue streams in order to gain a competitive advantage. Data has never been more valuable to us, but it has never been harder to manage.

Data is a business enabler. It can be easy to forget how important data delivery is to the smooth operation of a business, but as we increasingly move towards ‘computing anywhere’ as the new paradigm, speedy access to data underpins an ever-growing number of aspects of our essential operations.

A shake-up in the industry
Reflecting the growing importance of seamless data delivery to businesses as they become ever-more tech dependent, the storage industry has been developing at a significant rate in recent years. Some great new solutions have hit the market, and we are starting to see the beginnings of a shakeup of the industry.

For the past twenty years the industry has been dominated by large specialists like EMC and NetApp. However, the emergence of flash storage is providing customers with a simple, cost effective way to manage data, and new companies such as Nimble Storage, Nutanix and Pure Storage are starting to change the way the industry is run.
IDC recently found that the flash based storage market grew a massive 71.9 per cent on top of last year, so there is no question that flash storage is dominating the present market and driving greater expectations around performance, and data centre and TCO (total cost of ownership) reduction.

The new flash technologies are commoditising storage by delivering unrivalled performance and data efficiency which are redefining the economics of the data-centre.
Cloud on the horizon

Concurrently, over the past few years, enterprises and their lines of business have been looking to the cloud for flexible infrastructure and business agility. The first wave of these cloud native and content apps is well underway, but on the horizon a second wave of traditional enterprise applications are starting their journey to the cloud.

Placing far higher demands on storage, these applications expect enterprise reliability, durability and data services that are not typically available in the cloud.