Page 17 - EngineerIT January 2022

ICT – STORAGE

Five top storage trends for 2022

By Eric Herzog, CMO of Infinidat

ith 2021 behind us, we look at the storage market to see an exciting 2022 ahead of
us. Cyber resilience, AI, supercharged application and workload performance and
Wavailability, and reduction of OPEX and CAPEX in today’s world of hybrid cloud and
containers – all of these come together to frame up the next 12 months. Understanding these
enterprise storage trends will give you an advantage and help you formulate your strategic IT plan
going forward. Read what is coming your way in 2022.

Trend #1: The critical nature of data and cyber resilience from the storage estate
within the corporate/company cybersecurity strategy
The threat of cyber-attacks has reached such a feverish pitch that 66% of Fortune 500 CEOs named
it their #1 business threat in the Fortune 500 CEO survey in mid-2021. Similarly, in a KPMG CEO
survey in March 2021, CEOs also noted cybersecurity was their #1 concern. Alarmingly, the average
number of days to identify and contain a data breach, according to security analysts, is 287 days.
If an enterprise or service provider does not have data and cyber resilience, the cyber criminals
will be relentlessly launching cyberattacks. In short, it is not if you will suffer a cyberattack, it is
when and how often. Being prepared encompasses having data and cyber resilient storage as a
critical component of your enterprise’s corporate cybersecurity strategy. Trend #5: How storage reduces OPEX
and CAPEX for infrastructure
Trend #2: Incorporating AI technology throughout the entire storage system and Pressure for enterprise CIOs to reduce
software-defined storage and modern data protection infrastructure costs will only increase, given economic
Storage technology continues to be a critical foundation to optimise the performance of AI fluctuations and business uncertainties. IT
applications, workloads and uses cases. However, in 2022, the incorporation of AI technologies leaders will scramble to find ways to take
across storage systems and software-defined storage will deliver superior value, dramatically save costs out of the data infrastructure.
on CAPEX and OPEX, and improve real-world performance across all applications and workloads. Due to high performance and low latency
In 2022, AI will be used to build storage systems and SDS. This trend will harness the full power in a software-defined storage architecture, an
of AI for your storage estate. increasing number of organisations are able to
consolidate multiple workloads onto a single
Trend #3: Integration of storage technologies into off-prem environments based storage array in 2022, dramatically cutting
on hybrid and container technologies CAPEX and OPEX. No need any more for 50
The shift to hybrid cloud and container technologies will continue to proliferate at an accelerated different arrays each running 1 application or
pace. With many workloads moving to a hybrid cloud configuration, it will be imperative to have workload, when with 2022 enterprise storage
the infrastructure that supports core, edge and cloud, as well as the virtualisation layer and the solutions, all 50 of those applications and
container layer across a hybrid environment. workloads can fit on just one or two storage
This will enhance the ability of enterprises to deliver the right end-user services with the arrays. Talk about saving on watts, slots, power,
right SLAs for their business. The importance of possessing hybrid cloud integration capabilities cooling, floorspace, and operational manpower.
will substantially increase in 2022. We also see enhancements being adopted, such as logical Additionally, the use of storage built
air-gapping (both local and remote), which is an essential part of a hybrid cloud cyber security from the ground up with AI technology
strategy. substantially reduces your operational
manpower – hence OPEX. Having the storage
Trend #4: Leveraging storage technology to ensure application and workload system automatically adjust caching and other
performance and availability performance parameters on the fly with AI
Not only are servers important to real-world application performance, but storage is also accuracy or automatically configuring your
extremely critical. For highly transactional block workloads, there will be an enhanced focus on storage system, reduces the workload on your
application latency on read and write of sub-100 microsecond. While there are a multitude of IT, data centre and storage administrators.
storage performance metrics you can look at, latency is the number one determinant for real- Also, coupling that with AIOps centric storage
world transactional performance. monitoring and metricing software with
Through the real-world application layer (not “hero” numbers), an IT team could see proactive support will lower your OPEX
performance as low as 50 microseconds on the read side and as low as 75-80 microseconds on the and CAPEX as well. In fact, some storage
write side. This will optimise real-world performance. Accepting anything less means a company is companies have extended their own AIOps
stuck in a legacy solution that is sub-optimal. storage software with that from Data Centre
While application performance is critical in today’s enterprise, having the maximum system AIOps vendors, such as ServiceNow, Virtana,
availability is also just as critical. If the storage is fast but not available, then performance is a VMware, Splunk and others, reducing not
moot point. In 2022, we see a dramatic emphasis by enterprises on having their storage meeting just OPEX for your storage but OPEX for your
100% availability characteristics. overall data centre. n

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