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Five trends in data storage that you should pay attention to in 2020

The advent of the new year and the new decade is a great time to critically evaluate and study the key trends in the technology and data storage sectors that will be with us over the next months.



It is already obvious that the arrival and future ubiquity of the Internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and smart technologies have been recognized by everyone, in addition, network connections and the computing power that will be needed for all these solutions to work are already being actively discussed. But do not forget that the third element is also actively developing, which is, so to speak, behind the scenes of the implementation of these innovations. It's about data storage. An efficient and operational data storage infrastructure is key to the success and longevity of the company, and scaling is important for monetization and maximum use of data.

An increase in the recording density on HDD-drives, both on traditional ones - filled with air, and filled with helium, means that the most modern HDDs will receive a capacity of up to 16 TB, while HDD-drives by 18 TB with traditional magnetic recording (CMR) and on 20 terabytes for tiled magnetic recording (SMR) are currently in the testing phase and will hit the market later this year. Over the next five years, SMR is expected to increase significantly, paving the way for more efficient workload sharing and innovation from the Zoned Storage category. In a scalable environment, an increase in recording density is a key element in providing greater capacity at a reasonable total cost of ownership (TCO), and the further evolution of SMR will help. At the same time, thanks to the benefits,which gives flash technology to solve such work problems as analytics and AI, storage systems using exclusively flash drives are more widely used. Further development of 3D NAND flash technology further increases density and reduces physical size by vertically stacking layers and scaling horizontally across the wafer, combined with an increase in the number of bits.

The main driving force, without which it will not be possible to fully unleash the full potential of flash memory in SSDs, is the transition from SATA to NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express). This high-performance protocol, used to access servers, storage equipment and network storage factories, dramatically reduces latency and speeds up applications to complete work tasks.

But let's go beyond innovation in the areas of HDD, SDD and flash and analyze a few more global trends, which, in our opinion, will determine the development of the storage industry in 2020 and in the longer term.

The number of local data centers will increase, new architectures will appear


Although the pace of transition to the cloud does not decrease, two factors can be distinguished that support the further growth of local (or micro) data centers. First, new regulatory data storage requirements are still on the agenda. Many countries adopt laws on the conditions for data storage, so companies are forced to not release data far from themselves in order to properly assess and mitigate potential risks associated with ensuring the security and confidentiality of data held. Secondly, the repatriation of clouds is observed. Large companies strive to keep their data proprietary and, by leasing the cloud, can reduce costs and, at their discretion, control various parameters, including security features, latency and access to data; this approach leads to increased demand for local storage.

In addition, new data center architectures will appear to handle the ever-increasing volume and variety of data. In the era of zettabytes, due to the increase in the volume and complexity of work tasks, applications and AI / IoT data sets, the architecture of the storage infrastructure will have to be changed. New logical structures will consist of several levels of SDH, optimized for different work tasks, in addition, the approach to system software will change. The Zoned Storage open source initiative for zonal storage of data will help customers fully realize the potential of managing zone-based block storage devices on both SMR HDDs and ZNS SSDs for sequential write tasks with a predominance of read operations.This unified approach allows you to manage naturally serialized data with scaling and provides predictable performance.

AI standardization for easier deployment of peripherals


Analytics is without a doubt a good competitive advantage, but the amount of data that companies collect and process for insights is simply too big. Therefore, now, in a new world where everything is connected to everything, the implementation of certain work tasks is shifting to the periphery, which makes it necessary to teach these tiny terminals to run and analyze an ever-increasing amount of data. Due to the small dimensions of such devices and the need to quickly put them into operation, they will evolve towards greater standardization and compatibility.

It is expected that devices for using data will be divided into levels, and innovations in the field of media and factories will gain momentum, not decrease


Stable exabyte growth of applications with a predominance of read operations in the data center will continue and will lead to the emergence of new requirements for the performance, capacity and cost-effectiveness of storage levels as companies more and more differentiate services implemented through their storage infrastructure. To meet these requirements, data center architectures will be even more inclined toward a data storage model that enables it to be provided and accessed over a factory with a basic storage platform and devices that implement a range of service level agreements (SLAs) in accordance with the specific requirements of the applications. We expect an increase in the number of solid state drives for processing fast data and, at the same time,continued unrelenting demand for exabytes of economically viable scalable storage, which will continue to maintain a steady increase in the capacity of the corporate HDD fleet for storing big data.


Amid exponential growth in data volumes, further diversification of workloads and requirements for IT infrastructure, companies must offer customers faster and more flexible solutions, while simultaneously reducing the time they take to market. Ethernet factories are becoming the "universal backplane" of the data center, unifying the processes of sharing, filling and managing with scaling in order to meet the needs arising from an even greater variety of applications and work tasks. Composable infrastructure represents a new architectural approach in which the NVMe-over-Fabric extension is used to dramatically improve the utilization, performance and flexibility of computing power and storage in the data center. It allows you to disaggregate storage from computing systems,allowing applications to use a common storage pool, while data can be easily shared between applications, and the required capacity can be dynamically allocated for some application, regardless of location. In 2020, composable disaggregated storage solutions that will scale well over Ethernet factories and unleash the full potential of NVMe devices for a wide variety of data center applications will continue to expand.which effectively scale over Ethernet factories and unleash the full potential of NVMe devices for a wide variety of data center applications.which effectively scale over Ethernet factories and unleash the full potential of NVMe devices for a wide variety of data center applications.

HDD- -


Despite the fact that for several years, many have predicted a decline in the popularity of HDD-drives, at the moment there is simply no adequate replacement for corporate hard drives, because they not only as before satisfy the needs associated with the growth of data volume, but also show economic efficiency in terms of total cost of ownership (TCO) when scaling for hyper-scalable data centers. As the analyst firm TRENDFOCUS in his report "Cloud gipermasshtabirovanie and corporate storage» (Cloud, Hyperscale, and Enterprise the Storage the Service), enterprise HDD-drives are consistently high demand: the market for corporate needs will be displayed exabytes devices, and the annual growth five calendar years from 2018 to 2023 will be 36%. Moreover, according toIDC , in 2023 103 Zbytes of data will be generated, 12 Zbytes will be saved, of which 60% will go to the main / peripheral data centers. Driven by an insatiable increase in the amount of data created by both people and machines, this fundamental technology will face new techniques for placing data, higher recording density, innovations in mechanics, smart data storage and inventions of new materials. All this in the foreseeable future will lead to an increase in capacity and optimization of the total cost of ownership (TCO) when scaling.

Given their fundamental role in storing and managing critical data for companies, HDD and flash technology will remain one of the fundamental pillars of successful and secure business operations, regardless of the size of the organization, its type, or the industry in which it operates. Investments in a comprehensive data storage infrastructure will allow companies to strengthen their positions and in the long term it will be easier to cope with the increase in data volume, without worrying that the system they built will not cope with the burden associated with the implementation of modern and high-tech business processes.

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