The Rising Trends of Data Storage – Cloud, IoT, and Data Center to Watch in 2019

Data storage demands these days continue to escalate at a rapid pace, as the global spread of the Internet and the digitization has disrupted the lives of people. According to a report, there would be around 40 zettabytes of data in the world this year. And by 2025, it's predicted that the global datasphere will reach 175 ZB, of which total 90 ZB will come from edge devices.

The biggest trend of data storage this year is the explosion of the cloud and the ease that cloud storage can bring. But cloud storage isn't the whole big trend, as IoT data generation ramps up and on-premises storage technology continues its growth. Data from smartphones generated by humans like selfies shared on social media sites account for a fair amount of the data. But the most real data comes from machine-generated such as IoT devices.

Today, AI developers are looking to train machine learning models locally on devices, instead of paying the high cost to move all that data back to the data center or the cloud. As much more data will appear and disappear on the edge, it doesn't mean the market for long term storage will be aching. An IDC report projects that the storage industry will ship the total capacity of 42 ZB between 2018 and 2025.

The other reason behind the rise of cloud storage is that it will account for almost half, meaning 49%, of data storage by 2025. With a large number of data centers available across the globe, cloud vendors like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Alibaba have the scale and global reach that can satisfy the capacity and data locality demands of enterprises worldwide.

These cloud vendors offer an array of storage options to their clients. Moreover, on the hardware front, it selects data from hard disk drives (HDDs) or solid-state drives (SSDs). The cloud vendors provide block, file, and object storage interfaces, offering customers with a range of options for performance, capacity, and cost. In the meantime, the shift to SSDs, in the data center, is well underway. As per Gartner, the high-end storage array market is transitioning from first-generation NAND flash technology that moved over established SAS and SATA disk adapters to more advanced NVMe technology that link directly to the PCIe bus.

In the solid-state array market, leaders such as Pure Storage, NetApp, HPE, IBM, Dell EMC, Hitachi Vantara, and Kaminario, are all looking to take advantage of NVMes technology and seek out to adopt this technology this year.

As the adoption of NVMe technologies in the enterprise and the cloud storage system is currently ramping up, there are even more advanced storage solutions coming on the horizon. In this regard, enterprise storage administrators should watch storage class memory (SCM) technologies that are just now starting to come to the marketplace. Phase Change Memory (PCM) is one of the early SCM technologies, which offers performance between a NAND flash drive and DRAM (Dynamic Random-Access Memory).