Tegile Outlines Six Top Storage Trends for 2013

Tegile Systems, Inc., in primary storage de-duplication in virtualized server and desktop environments, highlighted six predictions the company feels will impact enterprise storage in 2013 and beyond.

"In 2013 there will continue to be a focus on storage systems that deliver high performance through SSD, while preserving $/GB," said Rob Commins, VP of marketing, Tegile Systems. "Looking for the right balance of performance, efficiency and usability will always be of paramount importance, regardless of the year."

Tegile’s predictions include:

Industry will continue to struggle
to deliver on the promise of converged infrastructure
Many large firms and small start-ups alike have been using the phrase ‘converged infrastructure’ to explain the notion of pools of assets that can deliver storage, server and networking resources to applications. These assets will be managed as a single entity that can be provisioned, monitored and managed from a single vantage point. The issue though is that virtualized environments are often overtaxed enough to produce a DR failover. What this tells us is that the self-healing and self-adjusting infrastructure isn’t in the bag and still has plenty of growing to do before the notion of the self-healing datacenter becomes a reality.

Managing virtualized infrastructure
will continue to be too complex
Just as the real estate market runs off of location, location, location, it is clear that the virtualized datacenter runs off of reporting, reporting, reporting. At a high level, two data centers may be in balance, but a key component underneath the hood may be in a high-speed wobble. Getting at these issues quickly and concisely is key. Monitoring and managing a multi-tenant environment is the norm and the idea of an automated data center is probably still on the horizon in 2013.

2013 may be the year VDI arrives
For years the market has been saying that this is the year that VDI arrives. However 2013 may very well be the year that VDI gains a strong hold in the enterprise. Tegile believes we’ll see VDI as a nascent slice of the mobile workforce device market share in 2013 That being said: there is a ton of work to be done to get the acquisition cost and the operational economics for VDI to work. Customers are still telling us that storage takes upwards of 40% of the budget for a VDI implementation.

Big data in 2013 is a big deal
Apparently everyone’s data’s got really big all of the sudden. Everyone loves what big data stands for. What is unclear is how the advent of big data is making things so dramatically different for IT. Users still need blazingly fast infrastructure running at low latencies and large repositories for unstructured data. This sounds awfully familiar to what we in the IT market have been working on for many years now. What appears to be different is the confluence of cost, performance and ability to leverage cloud-based solutions to answer bigger questions than we’ve been able to in the past. That’s the big deal – not the big data itself. Still, in the end, yes, big data should help business drive big earnings. To the IT team in the boiler room, managing all this data will likely look very familiar.

SSDs become mainstream
SSDs have really made an impact in how we optimize storage tiers for IOPs. Lots of noise has been made about SSDs being the death knell for hard drives. The almost religious position some vendors have taken is reminiscent of the "tape is dead" debate that has been going on for almost 20 years. The HDD industry has proven time and time again, that with hard-core chemistry, engineering and tribology, the super-paramagnetic limit can be lifted and the $/GB curve will continue to drop. In 2013 and beyond, there will still always be a place for hard drives that are optimized for $/GB. HDDs optimized for $/IOP are a dying breed.

Hybrid storage architectures will take center stage
The acquisition and operational cost of SSDs is far superior to HDDs. This is why so many newer vendors are focusing on hybrid architectures and using SSDs for performance optimization and HDDs for capacity optimization. There are a few niche scenarios that call for an all-SSD shared storage system, but the opportunity for hybrid arrays is far bigger.