Storage trends and products

The primary storage's market is consolidating, leaving only a few vendors as the main players in the market, such as EMC, IBM and HP.  Primary storage's providers will put greater emphasis on the efficiency of the overall stack and financial approaches of subscription like cloud services in the future. Companies like NetApp and Hitachi are expanding their technology stack and moving toward the cloud and big data field, and their primary storage business is not going to have big growth in the future. Hitachi, for example, has shrunk their product lineup and now they actually only have two storage products (VSP 5000 and HCP). They strategically chose to focus on the higher stack, such as IoT, data management, big data analytics and so on, and storage is now critical to their overall strategy.

Secondary storage (storage that isn't business-critical) hasn't seen the same kind of consolidation as primary storage, and many startups still have the potential to disrupt the market. Cohesity, the leader in the second storage, has the following properties:

  • No node size limit.
  • Unlimited high-performance snapshots.
  • Global variable length distributed re-delete compression.
  • Global indexing and searching.
  • Adopts distributed database NoSQL, supports Map-Reduce, makes the metadata truly distributed, and reduces the user cost.
  • Can intelligently identify backup stream (sequential IO) and development test stream (random IO), and adopt QoS to guarantee the performance of development test.
  • File and Object multi-protocol support.

Qstora is another noteworthy new storage software that has made significant optimizations in terms of underlying adaptations and ease of use. QStora runs as a group of user-mode processes, does not rely on any specific version of Linux kernel or distribution, does not rely on, or modify the operating system environment, does not monopolize the entire hard drive, and does not interfere with the execution of any other processes. Thus, QStora can run in the same Linux operating system instance concurrently with other applications.  QStora allows each Linux operating system instance in the cluster to have different hardware configurations, such as different numbers of CPUs, different sizes of memory, different capacities of local hard drives, etc. As a result, it is particularly well suited to taking advantage of all kinds of old hardwares.

Most vendors have begun to assess their situation and work on how to make them more relevant to their customers, and are moving the technology stack up. Storage hardware is no longer important. Hybrid cloud, data management and data analysis is the future for storage providers. At World 2013, EMC unveiled ViPR, the first software-defined storage platform in the world. It is a storage virtualization software that separates the upper storage management functions from the features of array layer, the entire system will provided as a controller mechanism in a heterogeneous infrastructure. The biggest value is the ability to control multiple storage devices regardless of which vendor they come from. ViPR protects EMC from commerical hardware's impact on its existing data center market. IBM Elastic Storage System is a modern implementation of software-defined storage, provides both capacity nodes and low latency analysis nodes with market-leading performance, density and scalability that seamlessly integrate to the AI and big data journey. According to IBM's official statement, Elastic Storage can reduce storage costs up to 90% by moving data into more economical locations. 


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