Storage Trends in 2013

As the year begins, it is kind of a popular game to try to predict what is coming in the year. However, as far as storage industry goes whichever way one looks, it does not appear that the game can be much interesting. One  good measure of interesting-ness is (1.)how predictable the market is and the other one could be (2.)how likely a new technology is going to be disruptive. As far as the market is concerned, results from last years tell us the market has been quite stable with EMC leading the pack almost in all fronts of storage systems with more than 1/3rd share of market, while IBM, NetApp, HDS and HP closely competing with each other to pick up second position in the rank. Gartner's 3rd Quarter, 2012 chart [source], below shows relative positions of the storage system vendors.
Growth projectiles of individual players also do not throw up any possibility of surprises with EMC continuing to lead with large margin in the foreseeable future. IDC for example in its press release last November, 2012 forecast 2013 to be a slow growth year. "While both EMC and NetApp continue to gain market share, which should enable both vendors to outpace the overall market growth rate, we are modestly concerned with the current estimates for EMC (+9.5% in 2013) and NTAP (+7.6%) vs. the (forecast) industry growth of 4%.", IDC report says. Gartner also sounded similarly in their 2012-end forecast about the market. To sum up, we do not expect much of reordering in ranks this year too.
As far as technology trend is considered, we have seen published views of 3PAR (HP) CEO David Scott and NetApp CTO, Jay Kidd.
While both focus on their respective solution portfolio and positioning, Mr. Kidd paints the picture with broader brush. He sees, dominant market play of Virtualization, Clustered Storage, Flash Storage and Cloud access in 2013. EMC in addition talks very strongly about Tapes. Tapes?? Some would sneer that it looks like a regressive step. But frankly if enterprise is buying tape storage, there must be strong reasons for that. With larger archive, the need, to drive down power, rack density for archive storage, has become stronger and EMC is giving a solution where Tape adequately addresses that need, especially where EMC gears constitute most of the data centre equipment. But we are digressing.
Coming back to where we started, based on what we can distill from all the chatters, there are three distinct technological patterns:
1. more penetration for solid state storage as differentiator in tiered storage system and
2. stronger play of virtualization in storage deployment to enable more data mobility and
3. growth of  object storage.

Let's take them individually.

Flash-based Storage /Solid-state Storage

Samsung SSD vs SATA HDD: source CNET

Solid-state storage [based on NOR or NAND flash] devices gained popularity in last decade, especially in consumer devices. With passing years, SSDs vendors have brought more reliability, memory density and longer device life time so much so that enterprises see SSD as strong alternative to high-speed HDD. Compared to disk-based HDDs, SSDs offer almost 3 times lower power consumption and magnitude faster memory access [no seek time for SSDs] making it better fit for high-transaction-throughput server. SAP's HANA for example runs entirely on memory to provide faster throughput. SSDs become cheaper alternative in this scenario.  However big storage players so far showed lukewarm response due to high cost of SSD compared HDD-based system. Most of the large storage players brought in flash as fast cache or accelerator in otherwise disk-based storage controllers for read/write throughput [some are using it to store metadata for active storage volumes] but so far complete SSD-array has not come to mainstream. Startups like Whiptail and Violin Memory are betting on full flash-based storage array and not surprisingly they are making quite a few positive news splashes too. Many believe that 2013 will herald the era of SSD-based storage arrays in mainstream enterprise storage. Here is a recent story where Indian Railway System [IRCTC] is looking at SSD to boost performance for online real-time ticketing system. In a tiered storage structure, it looks like flash-based storage or SSDs will see a dominant role in Tier-1 or performance tier in this year. [For more on tiered storage concept see my previous post]

Virtualization

Virtualization is not a new story. VMware continues to shape the storage deployment topography where mobility of not only virtual machines but mobility of entire solution bundled with storage, server and networking infrastructure is making headway. Here we are talking about mobility of entire application ensemble. While EMC gets the biggest benefit of VMware's dominance, by working with all leading storage players like NetApp and HP and networking giant Cisco, VMware has almost created a de-facto virtualization solution for enterprises.  There are are few IT managers, though, who are brave enough to try linux based virtualization solution. IBM for a change is pushing KVM [linux virtualization solution] and trying to position it as alternative to VMware solutions. Read more at IBM blog. There is however hardly any different opinion that virtualization will drive most of the storage deployment this year [I am not counting tape storage here]. IDC also forecasted that in 2013, 69 percent of workloads will be virtualized.
Software Defined Data Centre [SDDC] is a term that has got quite popular in electronic chatter these days. Although VMware coined the term some time back but the way people are using it today is very different from the way VMware outlined. SDDC is used to describe scenario where entire data centre is defined in software and provided as a service. It takes lot more than just virtualization of server and storage but primary constituent of the solution definitely is virtualization. From that perspective, we would put SDDC under Virtualization in the present context.

Object Storage

Object Storage largely comprises all cloud-based storage access. Typically a cloud is accessed over HTTP-based interfaces where all storage entities are referred as objects, i.e. a URL is an object, a File is an object, a database entry too is an object. In other words whenever one accesses storage using any of cloud APIs, one is accessing object storage. In a sense this is an abstraction but in many other senses, it is new way of dealing with storage. It is kind of getting closer to application semantics. As enterprises are moving to Cloud [public or private], storage accesses is getting objectified.
In 2013, Adoption of special cloud-based software will expand as the applications will become more and more cloud-aware. Mark Goros, CEO of Caringo, the leading provider of object storage software, tells us that, "The shift to object storage is being driven by IT trends, including the adoption of cloud services, emerging analytics applications, BYOD and mobility, as well as the market momentum of research, healthcare, government and life sciences." [source]. While there are public cloud gateways like Nasuni File server or NetApp® StorageGRID® gateway that connect enterprise data centres to public cloud like Amazon or Rackspace, the challenge of object storage is less about handling throughput, it is more about how one can organize, move and manage huge number objects of varied sizes in an unconstrained namespace. As is evident, enterprise object storage will closely follow the evolution of large public Cloud infrastructure like Amazon EC or Microsoft Azure.