Staying ahead of key IT trends can help companies build storage infrastructure that’s predictive, enduring, and cloud-ready so that they can anticipate and prevent issues across the infrastructure stack, support data growth and mobility, and ensure future flexibility.

To help guide in your investment decisions, here is the list of top data storage industry trends for 2018.

  1. Flash storage adoption will get bigger and faster.

    Year 2018 will see wide-scale adoption of flash storage. Organizations of all sizes will include solid-state drive (SSD) for greater performance, energy savings, space efficiency, and reduced management. New technologies like integrated data protection, storage federation/automation, policy-based provisioning and public cloud integration will be built on top of this flash foundation.
    Flash storage is the new standard with growing demand and dropping prices. Customers reported a significant power and cooling savings when they replaced legacy disk storage with all-flash technologies.

  2. Artificial intelligence will gain significant traction in the data center.

    Vendors who harness the power of big data analytics will continue to differentiate their products and deliver measurable business impact for customers. AI will result in huge opportunities to radically simplify operations and automate complex manual tasks. Companies should consider the incorporation of AI as a storage purchasing decision criteria for this year.

  3. Predictive storage analytics

    Predictive storage analytics surpasses traditional hierarchical storage management or resource monitoring. The goal is to harness and divert vast amounts of data into operational analytics to guide strategic decision-making.
    Predictive analytics lets storage and network-monitoring vendors continuously capture millions of data points in the cloud from customer arrays deployed in the field. They correlate the storage metrics to monitor the behavior of virtual storage running on physical targets. More vendors will embed analytics tools in their solutions.

  4. Hyper-convergence move into secondary storage

    Many organizations are putting greater emphasis on secondary storage to optimize primary storage capacity. Secondary storage frees up primary storage, while leaving the data more accessible than archive storage. It also lets organizations continue to gain value from older data or data that isn’t mission-critical.
    Companies will discover the flexibility, benefit, and convenience of hyper-converged infrastructure for storage in 2018 over build-your-own infrastructures, even though HCI is more expensive compared to traditional IT infrastructures.
    Businesses will look into Automated Storage Tiering (AST) which is a storage software management feature that dynamically moves information between different disk types and RAID levels to meet space, performance, and cost requirements.
    Applications aware snapshot with primary storage will be in focus in terms of protecting data and achieve best in class RPO & RTO.

  5. Multi cloud storage

    Multi-cloud storage still has its share of challenges. Moving data in and out of cloud is more complicated than moving it across on-premises systems, and managing data stored in different clouds requires a new approach.
    A true heterogeneous, multi-cloud offering means applications and data can run across different public cloud environments, such as AWS and Azure, or between a public and private cloud.

  6. Non-volatile memory express (NVMe) over fabrics

    Performance boosting, latency lowering nonvolatile memory express is already one of the technology trends in SSDs that use a host computer’s PCI Express bus. The revenue stream for NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) will grow in 2018.
    NVMe allows you to take your flash storage to the next level, taking advantage of the massive parallelization of SSDs and next-generation SCM technologies while doing away with SCSI overheads. Although NVMe standardization is still nascent, the use of NVMe over Fabrics lets you extend the benefits of NVMe between host and array, preserving high bandwidth and throughput and delivering the ability to handle massive numbers of queues and commands.
    The main use case for early NVMe-oF based products has been real-time big data analytics applications. By 2020, IDC predicts that 60% to 70% of Fortune 2000 organizations will have at least one real-time, big data analytics workload.

  7. Software-Defined Storage (SDS) will be ubiquitous

    2018 will see a surge in software-defined storage due to the growing influence of bare metal technology. All storage vendors use software-defined technology and customers are not tied to a single hardware. SDS will support your legacy assets, allowing you to take advantage of subscription or consumption-based storage models.
    SDS can also help you leverage software enhancements that utilize the analytics output by classifying, tracking, and moving data to the appropriate locations within your storage environment.

  8. IoT computing and analytics

    When IoT data is combined along with the data that’s collected from other systems, it puts a huge burden on your storage.
    This data is at the edge of the network, not the core, and must be stored – and acted on – at the edge. IoT analytics can help to improve your efficiencies and gain insights into your customers. In 2018, storage vendors will seriously look at their value in the IoT business beyond providing a landing pad for what is often transient data.

  9. Computing will move to the storage

    Today, data is stored on premises, in the cloud, or in devices at the network edge. Disparate data locations, combined with the difficulty of finding enough bandwidth to move data to where it is needed in a timely manner, are making it more important to move computing power closer to the data.

Due to newer more powerful or more power-efficient CPUs, data computation can now be found and easily accessed in the cloud, in devices on the edge, and even on storage arrays themselves. Given that compute resources can be accessed or moved more quickly than data, expect portable computing resources to be wherever the data lives.
The longer companies wait to adopt to these storage trends the more difficult it will be for them to cope with the business demands. Having a partner like GAVS will enable companies to bridge the storage gaps, boost efficiencies and stay ahead in the market.

GAVS’ infrastructure services include Datacenter, Security, End user and NOC services that can tackle any of the challenges that your legacy storage environment throws up to lead the IT transformation.

Contact GAVS to define a clear storage roadmap for 2018 at https://www.gavstech.com/reaching-us/