Widespread Adoption of Flash in 2012 Will Force Vendors to Improve Storage Management Software

This is the third of four articles that review the details behind IDEAS predictions for 2012. The first two articles focused on the drivers of cloud computing adoption and the changing landscape of client devices.

In 2012, the lines between servers and storage will continue to blur as systems vendors focus on solutions that integrate flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs) into servers, either complementing or replacing hard-disk drives (HDDs). As a result, a need will arise for storage management software that can bridge storage arrays and servers. Automated storage management solutions will also become increasingly important in emerging markets.

SSDs are being deployed more and more widely in environments that demand high levels of throughput in terms of input/output operations per second (IOPS), taking some pressure off the need for a sea of HDD spindles. Rotating magnetics will still have a role in the storage hierarchy, just as tape is still viable as a low-energy-consumption archival media. However, HDDs are unlikely to see any more real innovation beyond improving density. The high-performance tier, which requires the most IOPs and the lowest latency, will increasingly be based on SSDs. SSDs are faster and provide much better energy efficiency than HDDs. As the prices for SSDs fall, their penetration rate in server deployments will increase, with a corresponding uptick in direct-attached-storage (DAS) solution sales, particularly in the midrange. Since a box of SSDs can perform at the level of a much larger array, customers who would have bought the HDD array before might buy the DAS SSD-box.

Although start-up companies with SSD-based offerings will see significant growth, these start-ups will not be picked up by larger companies, because the rate of acquisitions in the storage market will slow. Rather than buy a company for its SSD solution and have another unintegrated product, the largest vendors will work to integrate and utilize the technology that they have already acquired. As SSDs become a standard component in deployments, automated tiering solutions that arbitrate which classes of data or data chunks are assigned to the high-performance SSDs, will extend into the small and midsize business (SMB) space and become a much more commonplace customer requirement.

SSDs were originally used within server enclosures as cache devices and were largely outside the control of storage system software. When SSDs are integrated into storage systems, they can be managed by the storage system software to serve data, so that they are used not just as cache but as storage for "hot" data, with colder data on kept on HDDs. The challenge is to unify and integrate the management of SSDs attached to storage arrays and servers. Some integrated high-end solutions can already do so. However, when server vendors and storage vendors are different corporations, or separate divisions operating in their own silos, such integrated management becomes a challenge. In 2012, systems vendors will increasingly focus on devising solutions that integrate the management of SSDs in both server and storage domains.

In the next year, vendors will step up efforts to simplify and automate storage management as they focus increasingly on emerging markets, where the pool of skilled administrators is smaller and ease of use is more important than deep and complete capabilities. The need for storage service management will increase in tandem with cloud deployments. Traditional chargeback-based mechanisms for storage-usage accounting will be replaced by methods based on service catalogs (self-provisioning) to enable proactive cost allocation and precise service-level delivery. Storage virtualization is still a prerequisite for building private clouds, but it is no longer a significant differentiator among solutions from major vendors. Instead, storage service management and its integration with other IT service management solutions will be a more meaningful point of differentiation for cloud storage offerings.

Data mobility and collaboration will also become a new area of focus for storage vendors. Traditional data distribution technologies are no longer adequate for today's dynamic business environment. Organizations not only have more rigid demands for remote access of data but also face the challenge of enabling concurrent updates to the same data in real time by different users in different locations. Distributed file systems have been used to orchestrate remote data sharing. However, the market is in need of more advanced solutions that can provide greater performance (common network file transfer protocols are not very efficient) and accommodate application (that is, block-based) data.

Unified storage will also become a common requirement for entry-level and midrange customers. As vendors add multiprotocol support to their entry-level and midrange storage systems, deploying separate storage infrastructures for NAS and SAN will become unacceptable for most organizations. However, enterprise customers running a large number of applications still have valid business reasons to maintain dedicated SANs for quality-of-service (QoS) and business continuity assurance.