Tegile Systems, a provider of flash-driven storage arrays for databases, virtualized server and virtual desktop environments, expects a number of advancements in 2015 impacting the storage market, including flash performance and capacity, costs and the sales outlook.
“I have been in the data storage business since 1984, and I have never seen such dramatic change in such a short amount of time as we have this year,” said Rob Commins, vice president of marketing at Tegile Systems. “The tectonic shifts being driven by virtualization and solid state media are amazing.”
Experts at Tegile offered the following predictions for 2015:
- Bigger advances in flash performance and capacity – It is clear that the NAND vendors have thrown Moore’s law out the window, paving the way for even more aggressive density moves than this year. The effects of inline data reduction are keeping capacity demands in check, so users can expect to see very aggressive pricing for solid state drives in the 250GB to 2TB range. PCIe flash and NVDIMMs will make their way into shared storage devices, further driving latencies down. When changes in storage hit $/IOP and $/GB so hard at the same time, everyone would win.
- Flash enables Fast Data to emerge from Big Data – Flash is having a transformative effect on enterprises. In one case, a Wall Street hedge fund is running analytics in four hours that used to take more than 22 hours, according to Tegile Systems. This has had a massive impact on their business. The age of the real-time Enterprise is becoming a reality.
- Hybrid Upstarts take the stage from Industry Oligarchs – The market at large is beginning to understand the dramatic impact hybrid storage has in data centers. It used to take three 42U racks to store a little over 100TB at 75,000 IOPS. Now, that can be delivered in a single 2U array. Acquisition and operating costs are dropping faster than ever. Expect dramatic changes in the aggregate TB consumption curves, as inline data reduction becomes a must-have in the enterprise.
- The competitive chess board will get even more complex – With all these technology shifts in play, there will be massive shifts in the vendor base. Even more startups will come into play, some may fall out of play, some may get acquired, and as the public market keeps close watch in this space, we may even see an IPO or two. Many of the big vendors are sitting on lots of cash too – meaning more acquisitions are likely.
- Hyper-converged systems gain in popularity, but don’t materially displace storage – We’ve seen a few hyper-converged startups do quite well in the market. VMware is even in the game now with EVO:Rail. There are a few use cases such as big retail that make perfect sense for hyper-converged systems to be placed in each store. But there is skepticism on whether this will win in the data center world.
Utility-based purchases empower customers – With storage administrators facing the challenge of squeezing more and more life out of their arrays and finding a way to justify additional storage expenditures to their boss, capacity utilization-based models will grow more popular. Utility pricing would help users eliminate the risk of under- or over-sizing their storage infrastructures.
