Storage Outlook Report for 2022

Spectra Logic Corp. announced the release of its 7th Storage Outlook Report.

This report explores how the world manages, accesses, uses and preserves its ever-growing data repositories. Serving as a valuable planning resource for IT leaders, it also delves into the strategies and technologies designed with the vital role of protecting the data being created now and in the future.
 
“Supply shortages, an onslaught of cybercrime, and staggering data creation rates have sparked an unflagging commitment to storage technology advancements and new distributed cloud interoperability,” said senior director of emerging markets David Trachy. “These advancements will serve as the foundation of future storage, preservation, management and usage of the world’s treasury of information.”

 The report examines the technologies defining the long-term storage landscape today, covering persistent memory, flash, magnetic disk, tape, optical, cloud and future storage innovation.

Highlights explored within the 2022 report include:  
Flash:  
• PCIe Gen 5 products are in earlier stages of announcement and promise speeds that exceed 10GB/s. 
• Innovations include the utilisation of flash inside disk systems to improve capacity and performance.
Tape:  
• LTO-9 tape is now shipping with a capacity point of 18TB per cartridge, a 50% capacity increase over LTO-8.  
• Multiple tape vendors now shipping systems that support the AWS S3 Glacier storage interface will open a realm of new cost-effective possibilities between tape and cloud and prove to be game changing for data-driven organisations newly liberated from monthly cloud storage charges.

  
Cloud: 
• Cloud providers will consume, from both a volume and revenue perspective, a larger and larger portion of the storage required to support the digital universe.  
• 2022 will see further realisation of products designed with the cloud in mind, capable of supporting highly complex workflows. These solutions enable seamless integration of applications into storage infrastructure regardless of storage location – whether in the cloud, multiple clouds, and/or in multiple on-premises locations.  
• End users will no longer have to think about the underlying storage system, being empowered to set policies that allow the automatic movement of data to the right location(s), to the right storage tiers, at the right time, with the freedom to decide which processes they want to run locally, and which ones in the cloud.  
Sustainability:  
• There will be an increased focus on electrical energy consumption generated from non-renewable energy sources because of growing global warming concerns. 
• As the demand for information technology is predicted to grow by 6x over the next decade, the challenge will be how to satisfy this demand while at the same time attempting to decrease the associated CO2 emissions.