Enterprises have been forever chasing the dream of retrieving their applications in double time. This has resulted in the creation of a number of storage devices to provide exactly that. From 7,200 rpm and 15,000 rpm hard drives to hybrid drives and the latest flash arrays, all have tried to improve latency for several mission-critical applications. Over time, we have seen the rise and fall of several types of storage devices. If 2014 has to be remembered for one thing, then it would be for the interminable decline of enterprise hard drives.
The Demise of HDD-based Storage Systems?
For the past five quarters, there has been a consistent decline in the sales of disk-based storage systems. Even the release of high-end storage systems by some of the top vendors in Q3 2014 couldn‘t stall the fall in overall disk sales. This, however, does not mean the end of the road for disks.
A recent survey of storage admins conducted by ManageEngine revealed that 61 % of them would still upgrade their storage by buying additional disks. This means that though the expenditure on disks will not increase drastically, many of the storage admins still trust the disks to store their data. Even with their obvious flaws, such as higher latency and lower device life, disks remain the preferred storage device. However, customers are looking at other options such as flash arrays and software-defined storage (SDS) to respectively bridge the gap between performance and ease of management.
The Rise of Flash
The decline of disk storage has mainly been attributed to the popularity of all-flash arrays. In its recent Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays (SSA), Gartner revealed that the total revenue for SSA in 2013 was $667 million, with a massive year-over-year growth of 182 percent.
Compared to disks, flash arrays provide faster access times, improved performance, lower power bills and longer operational life — all of this without the wear and tear and relatively short life of high-end mechanical disks. Initial cost of ownership for flash is on the higher side, but the overall cost of owning and maintaining a flash array would be comparable to that of disks.
Gartner has predicted that by 2019, 20 percent of traditional high-end storage arrays will be replaced by dedicated solid-state arrays. And as the costs of flash arrays decrease over time — they’re less than $1/GB now, down from $3/GB in 2006 — more enterprises will join the bandwagon and replace their disks with flash.
SDS – The Dark Horse
Software-defined storage is another nascent technology waiting in the corridors to be adopted by the market. SDS solves the problem of storage management. Managing a heterogeneous, multi-vendor storage environment has always been a burden for the storage admin. SDS solves this by abstracting the physical layer from the software layer and gathering the storage capacity of all the devices into a central pool. Thus, the admin addresses a single pool to store and retrieve the data.
SDS adoption has been slow, and according to a recent ManageEngine survey, more than 43 percent of the respondents don‘t think SDS will benefit their storage strategy. However, this is bound to reduce once vendors start to aggressively educate admins about SDS and its benefits. With flash and SDS in their arsenal, storage admins will get what they’ve been longing for: that necessary boost in speed and simplicity in managing their storage environments. Hopefully, 2015 will be the year when that finally happens!
To try out ManageEngine OpStor (Storage Monitoring Software), log on to – https://www.manageengine.com/products/opstor/download.html
This article originally appeared in the Virtual – Strategy Magazine on December 15, 2014.
