Top Storage Trends to Watch in 2018

The year 2018 is fast-approaching, and it makes sense to review the new trends within the extensive storage landscape. Next year promises to make the work of the IT team simpler by taking the risky, complicated and time-consuming task of refreshing the system each year from them. The continuing development should enhance data storage and management and ultimately the speed and performance of businesses. We have gathered the new developments that will shake and move the storage industry and provide value for the next 12 months.

Software-Defined Storage (SDS) and Distributed Storage (DS) Solutions Gain Traction

Software-Defined Storage seals the gap between legacy infrastructure and the modern business storage needs. In 2016, the SDS took the second position just after the standard SAN. However, SDS was the first options among the companies in 2017 and will continue to increase in popularity in 2018 and beyond.

Companies are now opting for both the DS and SDS, and they’re expected to feature in 30-50 percent of the projects in next year. According to IDC, the demand for SDS will grow by 13.5% between 2017 and 2021. By the end of the projected growth period, the SDS market will be worth $16.2 billion.

Enhanced Storage and Data Intelligence with Analytics Adoption

For many years, storage has had no mechanisms of establishing the actual data demands other what was read or written recently. Besides, applications weren’t smart enough to process information regarding the storage. The storage too did not have capabilities of learning or analyzing the applications, such that the IT technicians were incapable of telling which data is hot, inactive or cold.

With the metadata intelligence, the admins and software can now keep tabs on the last accessed files, modifications made, when and by who. This intelligence is crucial to the admins as they can now manage their storage resources more efficiently. Besides, they’ll find it easy to align the right data to the resource that optimize the business performance.

Businesses Will Adopt Multi-Cloud Storage

Today, most enterprises have migrated the storage of their data and applications to the cloud for more security, cut costs, improved collaboration, enhanced convenience, and increased efficiency.

From 2018 moving forward, more businesses will continue to take advantage of the hybrid delivery models to store their data on multiple clouds. The flexibility of the storage option will make it simple to place your data across the various platforms on the private, public and hybrid cloud.

And while the cloud storage lowers the risks of the downtime, the multi-cloud storage further reduces the downtime to insignificant levels in case one server is down. If you have a business and the public cloud fail, your customers can still access the data from the other platforms.

Increased Flash Space & Speed

Flash has replaced the magnetic disk drive and is now a common feature in both the high-end and low-end laptops. Besides, it has replaced the disks as the storage of choice in digital video recorders, desktops, and gaming devices.

Just like in the 2016 and 2017, we expect that the demand for solid-state flash storage will continue to scale up for the next 3 years. Spectra logic forecasts that with the shrinking of the disk market, the flash will become the most viable option. The success of the flash has been brought about by the vendor’s efforts to invest in the production of flash.

Starting next year, we should see flash vendors release units with high capacity, speed and at a lower price.  The new units of flash will have a non-volatile and low latency memory capable of enhancing the speed of your systems and application performance by up 10 times.

Analytics Tools Will Take Shape

Over the years, businesses have known of the existence of analytics tools but did not treat them as a critical component. As such, most of the firms did not integrate them into their IT environments fully. The year 2018 will see more companies accepts and adopt the analytics tools. They’re expected to have a significant impact on the storage.

More and more business have started to realize the effect of analytics tools on performance, availability, accessibility and the management of data. The knowledge and demand have seen the vendors design storage solutions with five clicks or less embedded into the tools. That development has made the search for information fast and straightforward.

Slowing Down of Manual Migrations

One of the most frustrating phases in a firm is migrations. It’s a hard moment for the IT professionals and administrators given the complexity and the involving nature of the entire process. Besides, it a costly and risky affair for the businesses since a slight mistake could result in massive losses. With the increased innovations, projections show that manual migrations have already started to fade away and the trend will continue throughout 2018 and beyond.

Now, the software can allow automated data mobility, and that makes migration pretty simple. Different storages will be interconnected through a global namespace, so the data gets moved automatically as the need to evolve arises. And when the administrator wants to reuse an old system, the software will assist in setting the objectives and determine where best to store the information in the system with just a few clicks.

IT Xchange offers new and recertified storage solutions to value-added resellers to serve their customers cost-effectively.