Enterprises will head into the next decade looking for solutions that will give them a competitive advantage. The main question is: “which ones?” Here Eric Bassier, Senior Director, Product Marketing, at Quantum, highlights four data storage trends that are poised to change the enterprise landscape.
The tape storage market will grow, reversing a decade-long declining trend
Tape has emerged as a key technology for massive scale cold storage infrastructure – both in the cloud and on-premise. The architectures used in the cloud will eventually make their way back into the enterprise. The market will continue to grow over the next five to ten years, based on a new use case for tape as cold for (primarily) video and high res image data.
NVMe will erode traditional SAS SSD array market faster than originally predicted
The growing need for speed and flexibility in data storage can also be witnessed across recent SSD (solid-state drive) developments, with NVMe (non-volatile memory express) becoming increasingly price competitive. Since the first version was released in 2011 it has seen considerable changes and now offers new performance advantages, by leveraging new networking technologies such as RDMA (remote direct memory access). These far outrun the benchmarks of traditional SAS SSDs. This, and the sharp price reductions in NAND flash this year, shows that NVMe will erode the traditional SSD storage market faster than predicted. Especially in markets where higher resolution content combined with higher frame rates, more bits per pixel and more cameras per project, are putting pressure on storage architectures. NVMe should prove particularly appealing with sectors such as media and entertainment and video surveillance.
Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) will see increased adoption in video surveillance
Worldwide surveillance storage revenue will grow from $3.4 billion in 2019 to $4.2 billion in 2020. This growth is driven by increased demand for better security, smart city and public safety initiatives (public sector), and the desire for business intelligence. Legacy systems require individual components to address compute, storage and networking while HCI for video surveillance integrates all three into a single platform, delivering easier to install and manage appliances that do not rely on specialist IT assistance. Moreover, HCI appliances enable storage to scale so that when environments grow, the platform can grow too — a challenge amplified by increases in camera counts, camera resolutions, and video retention times.
Video and images represent biggest data generator for most enterprises
Video and high-res image content will represent the biggest ‘class’ of data for enterprises heading into 2020 and beyond. Video as a data source has gained a lot of power. It gives companies information on predictable behaviors, as well as the ability to map out and mine visual data to get other valuable insights about what’s happening in the world. Previously, extracting intelligence from video data was a manual task, however, with artificial intelligence and machine learning a reality, the days of true video analytics are here. Between video for marketing and training purposes, surveillance footage, and content generated by machines in use cases as diverse as movie and TV production, autonomous vehicle design, manufacturing and healthcare, data will only continue to grow. Consider the years of video content recorded across social platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, mobile phones, CCTV cameras, and drones, and you may yet realize why video will represent the biggest data generator for most enterprises.
