Predictions for the top data storage trends of 2022

Technology means little in a vacuum. Data storage technology is no different. There is little value in a technology that solves a $1,000 problem at a cost of $1 million.

Whether a new technology is successful still comes down to the problem it solves, its net worth and whether it is compellingly better than what is used today. From that perspective, here are data storage trends to consider for 2022.

The battle for data storage performance supremacy will escalate

Our first data storage trend is the continued need for lower latencies to reduce application response times. Lower delays impact time-to-job completion and lead to higher productivity, faster time to actionable insights for databases, faster time to market, greater market share and faster time to revenue. Reduced last-byte delays are very important for high-performance computer message transfer interface applications.

Greater IOPS drives storage and database consolidation. Fewer database servers means fewer cores, reducing infrastructure costs while increasing performance. It also enables more application development at a much lower cost and accelerates increasingly popular blockchain applications.

The need for faster analytics, machine learning, deep machine learning and AI neural networks has organizations constantly asking for better throughput. This translates into faster time to actionable insights, time to market and time to first revenue.

Data storage performance is supported by the rapid adoption of various data storage technologies with much higher performance. For example, the use of NVMe-oF has grown steadily in many data storage systems and has three primary flavors: InfiniBand, Fiber Channel, and RDMA over Converged Ethernet. But these options usually require new switch and network interface card (NIC) infrastructure. NVMe/TCP is the most recent option, and it does not require upgrading the network infrastructure because it runs on top of TCP/IP that runs in standard Ethernet networks. It is also the easiest to implement. Unsurprisingly, it seems to be the most popular choice among CIOs, CFOs and IT pros in general.

Other technologies organizations are adopting to support data storage performance include:

The rapid deployment of PCIe Gen 4, and in some cases Gen 5, in data storage controllers and flash SSDs. PCIe Gen 4 has double the bandwidth of Gen 3, while Gen 5 has double the bandwidth of Gen 4. Using higher bandwidth NICs, ranging from 100 Gbps to 400 Gbps, which have significantly lower latencies. The highest bandwidth NICs require PCIe Gen 4 or Gen 5. Using data processing units (DPUs) that offload resource-intensive processes such as NVMe-oF, routing and even switching to significantly accelerate data storage performance. DPUs appear on high-bandwidth NICs and some data storage systems. Implementing faster NVMe flash SSDs that use other non-volatile memories in their controllers. This reduces drive latencies and increases IOPS and throughput. Using higher performance storage controllers with the latest CPUs from AMD, Arm and Intel.

Performance is a bit addictive. But when is it enough? The answer is actually never. As new levels are reached, complacency sets in. Applications then take advantage of these newer performance levels and end up demanding even greater performance. It’s a never-ending data storage battle that seems to be accelerating in 2022.

Data storage cyber resilience is becoming table stakes in the industry

This data storage trend is a direct result of the evolution of ransomware. Ransomware has become very good at deleting or corrupting data backups, storage snapshots, and replicas. It can also change retention policies, secure repositories, or simply delete directories. This is an insidious form of theft.

Data storage system vendors responded by adding immutable storage to make the volume, file system, or object number containing the backed-up data immutable for a policy-defined retention period. Others have added multi-step, multi-factor authentication for any changes to policies that affect the data. This prevents the ransomware from effectively sterilizing the backed-up data. It is not foolproof, nor should it be the only cyber defense used. And yet it’s another layer of defense that makes it a little harder for cybercriminals to succeed. It seems that in 2022 it will probably become data storage system table.

Unstructured data management will be a data storage game changer

Some readers may be scratching their heads and asking, “What the heck is unstructured data management?” A good way to think about it is the ability to add useful management structure and flexibility to unstructured data. It basically provides database-like management, searches, queries and control of unstructured data.

Unstructured data management is not new. Schema-optional databases — colloquially known as NoSQL databases even though SQL can be used — can be document- or object-based and provide management to unstructured data. However, the rise of self-governing AI machine learning or autonomous data management directly affects data storage.

Data storage vendors have implemented unstructured data management for several years. The problem is that their implementation is data storage centric, not data centric. These tend to be limited to the vendor’s own data storage systems along with some integration with S3-compatible object storage. It is rarely multi-provider and includes a customer in the provider’s data storage systems. If a customer doesn’t mind paying more and has no data storage choices going forward, this works pretty well. This is a key reason why unstructured data management has not become a big data storage trend to date. But that is about to change.

A new wave of unstructured data management products has emerged in recent years, extracting it from data storage. Some products sit outside the data path, others in the data path and some are a mix of the two. They are data storage system and vendor agnostic. They can archive, copy, move and delete original data from primary storage to S3 object storage or even tape, usually without hierarchical logs. Some products do this with symlinks, others with a global namespace. Some collect, harvest, analyze and manage metadata. Others do not.

The systems are incredibly scalable – in the hundreds of petabytes and even exabytes. Best of all, they don’t need to migrate data from the current file or object storage: They discover and map the data where it exists. Then they archive it, move it to the data storage required for specific data and make copies for different geographical locations. And organizations can justify the cost of these unstructured data management systems.

What makes this new breed of unstructured data management so promising is how it changes data storage purchasing decisions. Data storage systems can come from different vendors, so organizations can use the best storage for a given application. Based on its value and life cycle, data does not move to a separate tier in an expensive data storage system, but to a lower cost data storage system. It abstracts not only the unstructured data management, but many data storage system services such as lifecycle management, data protection and replication. Replication alone enables data copies to different data storage systems, types, providers, and media.

These next generation unstructured management systems from vendors such as 22dot6, Aparavi Software, Datadobi, Data Dynamics, Hammerspace, iXsystems, Quantum, Spectra Logic and StrongBox Data Solutions are likely to be major data storage trends in 2022.

On-demand cloud-based elastic pricing for data storage systems

It’s no secret that public cloud storage has occupied an increasing share of the data storage market. Elastic on-demand fees are charged only after an organization has used the storage capacity. This puts the risk on the cloud storage provider because the customer does not have to buy data storage ahead of time to meet their unknown needs as time goes on. It usually costs more, but not always.

The best way for data storage system providers to compete more effectively is to provide the same price on-premises service. Dell, HPE, Infinidat, NetApp and Pure Storage all have these cloud-like elastic on-demand pricing services. Expect several more in 2022.

This is a clear win-win for the customers and the sellers. Win-win situations almost always turn into trends.

Check back next year to see how accurate these predictions were.