The ever-growing amount of data from an expanding number of sources, new types of threats, new technologies with their own requirements for information flow management – all these factors are forcing businesses and organizations to reconsider approaches to data storage. As customers change, so does the market.
Along with traditional storage systems, three of the fastest growing types of solutions are gaining ground today: software-defined storage, hyper converged infrastructure, and storage as a service.
Software-defined storage (SDS)
By virtualizing and separating storage from hardware, you can easily reallocate and scale storage capacity as needed. More organizations are now taking this approach, with forecasts that by 2024, half of global storage capacity will be presented as SDS on premises or in the public cloud, up from about 15% in 2020.
The spread of SDS is largely due to the huge growth in unstructured data, which is especially expensive to store. This makes SDS the most suitable choice for object storage, although in some cases the technology is also used for block storage. The development of this trend is also facilitated by the fact that the prices of SDS solutions are declining, while the diversity of the offer is growing.
Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI)
HCI solutions combine storage with computing power and networking into one virtualized system. Over the past few years, the adoption of HCI has grown significantly and has gone from an option used for specific applications and workloads to a tool used throughout the company’s IT environment.
Studies have shown that more than 70% of companies are planning to implement HCI systems or are looking at them, and the remaining 30% have already implemented them. One reason for the growth of the HCI market is the maturity of the technology itself. Today you can get HCI nodes with hundreds of terabytes of flash arrays, four or more processors, and several terabytes of memory.
STaaS: storage-as-a-service
If SDS and HCI are fairly easy-to-use and scalable solutions for data storage tasks, then STaaS really allows you to implement the principle of “pressed the button – got the result.”
Solutions of this class allow you to store data in the cloud according to the “payment after the fact” model, and the provider / vendor is responsible for setting up the hardware, updating software, maintaining and supporting systems, without involving specialists from the company’s IT department. Customers can allocate and move storage resources as needed. STaaS adoption is expected to grow by 42% between 2020 and 2022.
Kubernetes expands the need for containerized storage
Organizations currently use the open – sourced container orchestration platform in large numbers since it is such a tremendous success story. In a private cloud or as a blend of a private and public cloud, 75% of businesses use Kubernetes. In the past year or so, vendors have been working to make containerized data storage available to their clients after realizing its importance.
Containers were originally designed to be run and deployed as needed. But companies want to use them for stateful applications, such as databases, which require capturing the entire state of the application—not just data, but also metadata and configuration.
Trend solutions in 2022 include the following:
- Cluster-size considerations
It’s a crucial consideration for businesses to purchase HCI equipment. While some HCI suppliers only offer a small number of nodes, some handle scale-out HCI clusters with 64 or more nodes. In 2022 and beyond, choosing these solutions carefully will be extremely important.
- Support options
When deciding whether to adopt the HCI solution, support is a key factor to take into account. Depending on whether a technology combines hardware and software, this may vary. While some solutions provide support around-the-clock, others do not. Solutions that offer assistance constantly may be balanced by lower onsite service for businesses.
- Storage types
Just a few of the storage options available are hybrid storage, which combines HDDs and SSDs, all-flash storage (SSDs), and traditional spinning hard drives (HDDs). Given that there may not now be a significant price difference between HDDs and SSDs, all-flash storage is becoming more and more common. Between HDDs and SSDs, there may be a noticeable performance difference.
- Multiple hypervisor options
This solution is present in some HCI alternatives but not in others. With some hypervisors, expanding nodes necessitates purchasing extra licenses. This affects HCI depending on the hypervisor that has been chosen to do a certain amount of work.
- Trial options
Is a trial version of the solution available in the event that it is required? The possibility of running Proof of Concept environments is currently a popular trend for testing out solutions and making sure they meet organizational needs.
- Sizing nodes
It can influence the selections made when deciding between sizing options when measuring nodes and clusters.
- Integration
Is there an easy way to use HCI solutions with containers? There will surely be a point in the business when containers are needed. In many businesses, the modernization of apps is in progress. For this, the capability to manage containers is essential.
North America is anticipated to experience rapid growth.
– Due to the huge number of well-known major players in the region, the US and Canada are anticipated to drive the expansion of the hyper – converged infrastructure market across North America, which is likely to account for considerable growth.
– The market is anticipated to exhibit significant development potential in the near future due to the region’s robust and well-established economy. Additionally, the rising use of virtualization across a number of industrial sectors is linked to market growth. The industry is also significantly influenced by the rise in demand for disaster recovery and data protection.
– The economies of the nations in this region also boast improved infrastructure, which can lead to greater Internet penetration. As a result, new technologies can be adopted more quickly, which in turn fuels the market for hyperconverged infrastructure.
