Blog Post

Storage Systems in 2019

2018 was a great year for storage systems. We successfully deployed many new storage systems and capacities for our customers helping them transform their data centres.

It is obvious that we are now in a data driven economy. Digital transformation not only produces vast new amounts of data, but mainly relies on the data layer as a core foundation. That foundation must be secure, rock solid, and consist of the most reliable components. Your data needs to be available, accurate, reusable, protected and performant in today’s data-driven enterprise. If it isn’t, you risk not being able to maximize use of data – your most valuable corporate asset.

As IBM Platinum Business Partner with Expert Level of competency in Storage systems we would like to highlight some of the trends which were influencing the transformation in the area of storage systems throughout 2018 and will continue to do so in 2019.

Flash

The need of fast, low latency and reliable storage made flash the first choice for both mid range and enterprise class storage systems in 2018. More than 90% from the new installed capacity this year at our customers private clouds are in all-flash systems.

All primary storage workloads should sit on flash and flash only.

There are number of reasons flash to be the king in 2018 and to remain as one in 2019:

  1. The price of flash has declined and is comparable to standard spinning disks systems.
  2. Flash performance and low latency are significantly better compared to standard storage systems.
  3. The business value of performance for the transactions and for workloads such as analytics and AI has increased as the businesses progress through the digital economy
  4. Operational expenses, rack space and power consumption are significantly lower with all-flash systems.

Therefore the use of all-flash storage systems is unmatched in its growth and will likely see rapid growth again in 2019 as more and more companies are deploying new capacities and moving workloads to flash.

 

NVMe

NVMe will  expand within the storage industry as a high-performance protocol: in storage systems, servers, and storage area network fabrics. The NVMe protocol capitalizes on parallel, low latency data paths to the underlying media, similar to high performance processor architectures. This offers significantly higher performance and lower latencies compared to legacy SAS and SATA protocols. This not only accelerates existing applications that require high performance, but it also enables new applications and capabilities for real-time workload processing.

 

Virtualization

Storage virtualisation or Software Defined Storage is not a new concept and has proven itself in many enterprise wide deployments even for the most critical workloads. However, many customers still have very conservative approach when it comes to the core of their data centres. Although server virtualization is a standard for all private clouds and develops even further to container based infrastructures, storage virtualisation is still not embraced by all enterprises.

We believe that will be the most significant change in 2019 and more and more companies will cloudify their storage infrastructures. The capability of storage to transparently move data across private cloud deployments and even to public clouds will become critical when it comes to automation, efficiency, fast provisioning and data protection. It is all about getting the right storage for the right job, no matter how you’re deploying your cloud environment.

 

Recap

While you are planning all those new services to your customers for 2019 and progress thorough your digital transformation path you must not forget to forge your foundations. Data is your most important asset which makes your storage infrastructure the most critical one for all your operations and business success - at the end it is your storage, your data, your business.

 

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