What’s in store for storage in 2016

Bassam Tabbara, CTO at Quantum highlights a number of trends to watch across the market segments:

1. Object Storage: Ready for its Close-Up

Sensor based data – combined with new, sophisticated tools for analyzing buyer behavior – are driving Enterprise IT departments to retain increasing capacities of historical unstructured data to allow their users to assess the present in the context of the past. Businesses have reached the tipping point where traditional data storage methods can’t support the resulting high capacity workloads. Object storage, with its online scalability and robustness, is the answer. Object storage has been in use for some time in major cloud service providers, but the technology is seeing traction with commercial enterprises now because it can scale to meet the capacity needs of massive data sets while keeping data at the ready. The unrelenting growth of unstructured data, together with lengthening RAID re-build times on high-capacity disks, is finally pushing enterprises into using object storage to extend online access to data in multi-petabyte, non-block data storage.

2. In Law Enforcement and Security, More Cameras + Higher Resolutions = Way More Data

Public safety has gone from a national security issue to the concern of every university, municipality, school and commercial enterprise. Cameras offer more sensors, wider panoramas and higher resolution than ever before. And the resulting information is useful not just for today’s security but for tomorrow’s buyer analysis (and litigation protection). All these trends are driving the storage of more data, longer, for surveillance. As a result, security managers, who once installed standalone systems, are going to need to partner with Enterprise IT department to address digital storage as a part of their video surveillance architecture. And with the need for storage investment needing to be balanced against the budget for cameras and infrastructure, Enterprise IT must be ready to support them with an architecture that supports easy data access, but at the lowest cost of ownership. Tiered solutions with tape will increasingly be the answer.

3. ‘Archive as a Service’ Finds a Home for Compliance Data – In the Cloud

2015 was the year when cloud service providers – like Google and AWS - offered more (and less expensive) options for storing long term data in the cloud. A mass of vendors also offered gateways to help customers move their data off premise. But customers made their preferences known. They do not want piece part answers. Particularly for compliance data, they want full outsourced solutions that simply remove the problem of archiving from the To Do list. 2016 will be the year these solutions arrive, with a major migration of customer compliance and “write once, hope to read never” data to the cloud.

4. When the Public Cloud is Not Enough

If over half of all enterprises are to adopt a hybrid cloud model by 2017 (as Gartner predicted last year) more organizations will be wrestling over where their data is stored. And, while public cloud is often touted as a more scalable and cost-effective storage solution than on-premise, the economics don’t always make sense depending upon the data to be stored and performance needed. The media & entertainment industry has been dealing with this issue for years, as production houses often need to move massive video data sets quickly across disparate locations and recalling data from a public cloud would be far too expensive and time-consuming. In 2016, as more enterprise IT departments wrestle with massive data workloads generated from corporate video marketing, virtualization and the Internet of Things, they will also turn to on-prem cloud storage to get the job done quickly and on-budget.