Storage as far as the computing market goes is the kind of thing we all depend on and use pretty much every day. So it's not surprising to see that the storage market in general is constantly in flux and producing major new advances. The folks at Tegile Systems recently took a good look at the storage market and determined six major new points that are likely to occur in 2013.
Obviously, the major thrust behind Tegile Systems' predictions is that there will be a focus on performance, delivering high speeds and high storage while keeping costs per gigabyte as low as possible. To that end, the six main points focus on at least one side of the equation, and some of the best focus on both.
First, converged infrastructure—the process of combining the various parts of storage, servers and networking into one—will still be a taller order than expected. More work will go into these processes, but it's likely to still stumble a bit as it makes its way from concept to execution. The problem is likely related to virtualized environments, which often wind up sufficiently burdened by the overall demands of the system to create failure points in their own. That leads handily into Tegile Systems' second prediction, notably, that managing those virtualized environments is still going to be too complex to do effectively. Systems that look fine in a high level view may be hiding parts of the system that are starting to go south, yet continue to answer back as being nominal. Getting to these potential failures before they become actual failures makes fully automated data centers still something of a dream.
However, one key point is likely to emerge in 2013, and that's virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). The benefits to such a system are too many to pass up yet issues of acquisition costs and operational costs are still plaguing the system. Storage alone is said to take up 40 percent or more of the total budget for a VDI implementation, but with costs starting to come down and new methods taking hold it's a fair bet that a turnaround could be in the future.
But what's likely to be a big deal in 2013 is Big Data. While Big Data has huge possibilities, it also needs a pretty significant infrastructure to properly corral all that data in one place and turn it into useful conclusions for users. Better yet, the principles of managing Big Data systems look pretty similar to current methods and techniques, so making some comparatively minor tweaks to bring Big Data into full play should be a lot simpler.
Solid state drives are likely to also be a big hit in 2013, as prices come down and quality goes up. While the sheer bulk that hard drives can offer will make them a big part of the market for a long time to come, solid state drives' speed and data safety and operational costs are hard to pass up. This is going to lead into Tegile's final prediction, the rise of hybrid architectures that focus on solid state for the sizzle of performance optimization and hard drives for the steak of capacity optimization.
The future is an ever-changing prospect, but if Tegile Systems predictions come to pass, the storage landscape is likely to be a lot more efficient and provide a lot more in the way of services for its users.
Edited by
Jamie Epstein
