They are, he said, “taking large numbers of storage controllers and disk but virtualising them and providing an abstraction layer between hosts and storage. This allows volumes of data to be seamlessly moved form on array to another including the connectivity ports.”
“For the IT department, they will need to factor in things such as VDI and other thin client initiatives, much greater need for video and similar file storage and business intelligence and analytical needs as well as traditional drivers for storage such as compliance,” Rob Paddon, Trilogy Technologies
With the recent slump in enterprise sales still weighing on some minds in the industry, Data Solutions’ O’Haire said one way for the sector to ensure it remains healthy into 2015 and beyond is for “traditional storage vendors and first generation converged infrastructure vendors race to catch up, from a technology perspective, with the new breed of flash-optimised and hyper-converged vendors such as Nutanix”.
Customers, O’Haire argued, want to drastically lower the complexity and cost of managing virtualised infrastructure and the “converged infrastructure 1.0” vendors have, he said, not succeeded in doing this so far.
For Ken Breen, CEO, Qualcom, the main issue at play in the near future is that “the cost per gigabyte (GB) has to come down” in the enterprise storage market. “The cost per GB in out-of-the-box hardware is exponentially lower than from a traditional SAN,” he said.
“Enterprises need to adapt to the software defined data centre and therefore need storage that is simple and flexible to manage, while delivering the performance required by modern applications,” said Breen.
Breen said “the software with the SAN has to be adaptive, flexible and also provide insights for the business. This means delivering reports at an application level.”
Managed storage services
Paddon of Trilogy Technologies said that alongside inevitable “technical and architectural changes” in the industry over the coming year to 18 months the enterprise storage space is also likely to see a noticeable shift away from organisations buying large amounts of storage as a capital investment “with the idea that if they buy enough up front it will carry them for the next three to five years”.
This often decidedly expensive practice, said Paddon “puts all the risk on the buyer and goes against all the logic of what cloud providers are offering in linking IT consumption and hence cost to business needs”. With this in mind, he said the “preferred option for many buyers” will now to be put the effort of managing capacity and availability onto the vendor. “The upshot of this,” said Paddon is that resellers who can then “deliver genuine managed storage services” will have a “major advantage” over companies who choose to “simply configure and install equipment”.
For Comsys’ Connolly “the main innovation that will change the market over the next 12 to 18 months is software-defined storage”. Removing the dependency on individual systems to provide a full set of resources to a company, this will, he said, also allow many customers to “re-use older systems for longer”.
Continued Connolly, “Storage systems, as with any other data centre component, require refresh cycles that bring many improvements and engineering enhancements, be it of their components or the system as a whole. However the enhancements themselves mean little if they do not carry business value for the customer. Backward compatibility in the storage systems is always an important consideration, especially in terms of utilising valuable existing storage assets.”
In this context, he said, software-defined storage “allows multiple systems to be logically merged into one pool of resources to be allocated where required, depending on the individual workload”.
Tackling Flash cost
For HP storage division EMEA GM, Johnson the next year will see a keen focus on industry innovations which reduce the cost of flash storage, a trend he said, which will contribute to an increase in high-end storage spending overall.
“Enterprise [organisations] have seen the performance that flash can provide applications but have faced limitations that prevent broad use,” said Johnson. The HP man added that by driving down the total cost of all-flash arrays using innovations that also boost performance and scale, and backed by availability guarantees, “all-flash arrays can be viable for a wide range of mainstream enterprises and service provider use that represent an expansion of the addressable all-flash market by billions of euro”.
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