Trends of data storage in 2018

Forecasts say that in 2018, the total amount of data that is "contained" in the data centers will reach 1450 eB, and in this area there are own trends are being formed, which you need to know.

HDD remains the leader of the price / reliability ratio
Despite the fact that the technology of production of SSD in the first queue is aimed at reducing the cost of 1GB in comparison with CDD, the price remains too high (more than 5 times). Experts say that in 3-4 years the price gap will decrease by 3 times. But before that time heavy data load companies like YouTube or Instagram do not want to start using SSD, since the storage cost per 1 GB is still too high. Therefore, hardware producers as well as research teams are working to introduce new solutions that would increase the performance and reliability of hard drives.

The popularity of SSD is growing in the corporate sector
In 2017 sales of hybrid flash-arrays reached $ 2 billion. The increased demand for SSD made producers to provide lower prices for storage devices (from 3% to 6%).
The growth of SSD`s popularity is also promoted by a number of new technologies and products. For example, Intel introduced in May 2018 a new model of the Optane 905P drive with a capacity of 960 GB.

Business chooses container technology instead of virtual servers
Purely software-defined resources, such as storage, will be provided mainly in the form of containers. In combination with dynamic APIs, these resources will be very flexible programmable infrastructures. This approach will allow producers to pack applications together with the infrastructure necessary for them into modules that can be deployed anywhere, creating even such clouds as data centers create. The ability to deploy a data center on demand will be widely used, for example, in recovery from disasters.

Machine learning will allow you to manage data storage in a new way
The increasing availability of ML algorithms will generate new storage management processes. Such processes will be able to learn, adjust operations and settings to optimize the load, quickly identify the root causes of anomalies, interact with the storage infrastructure, and manage large data to minimize costs.

MaaS is used for data storage more often
Most companies will manage their hybrid architectures using cloud-based MaaS services, and many will begin to abandon the onerous use of management software in their data center. Any storage array automatically informs technical support about emerging issues, analyzes management and optimizes performance.