Symons says: 2015 storage industry predictions from Gridstore CEO

The storage industry continues to undergo dramatic transformation as multiple forces impact technology, buying trends, and vendors. Data growth shows no sign of decreasing, while CIOs and IT administrators must contend with increasing service level demands from the organisations they serve as well as the continued fallout across all their infrastructure from the trend to virtualise everything. Two trends in particular stand out as transforming the storage industry, according to Gridstore CEO George Symons, and both will have dramatic impact on 2015.

2015 will experience explosive adoption of Hyper-Converged Infrastructures and the number of vendors jumping into this market will double

This will cause the largest change in the storage industry in years.

IT professionals are snapping up solutions that are demonstrably easier to procure and deploy, are supported by a single vendor, and reduce the management cost, all contributing to a lower TCO; Hyper-Converged solutions which include compute, network and storage in a single system rather than the traditional cobble-together-yourself deployments are growing rapidly to meet those demands. This trend is seen most pronounced in the mid-market but the enterprise segment is expressing interest in certain cases like VDI, where their legacy investment, extensive in-house expertise and specialised resources have less impact.

Just as we have seen virtualisation drive the commoditisation of the server market, hyper-converged solutions will drive the commoditisation of storage. Hardware is no longer a differentiating element and smart vendors are leveraging standard off-the-shelf equipment.

The key differentiating value in hyper-converged systems is the intelligent software to turn a commodity server and storage into a highly available, redundant, high performance compute/storage system. An example of this is Gridstore’s patented Server-side Virtual Controller Technology (SVCT).

The number of vendors in the hyper-converged space doubled in 2014, and will double again in 2015.

In 2015 All-flash will enjoy explosive growth and overtake hybrid storage as the most viable option for all primary storage

Last year it was predicted that hybrid storage would grow faster than all flash, but now with the cost per gigabyte dropping and capacity and longevity increasing, flash is now firmly in the affordable range for enterprises of all sizes.

Flash technology will continue to improve on all three fronts and we should see prices continue to decline, capacity increase, and 2-3x the lifetime of the current generation of flash

This will be the final year of consolidation for pure flash vendors

  Flash technology is evolving quickly resulting in increased adoption:
The price of flash on a per GB basis is dropping faster than many predicted which creates the basis for more all flash solutions. This is relegating Hybrid (flash as cache plus spinning disk) to more secondary storage solutions rather than the leading primary storage solution. Users want predictable performance and with all flash, there is no chance of a cache miss and a hiccup in performance.

The capacity for SSDs and PCIe flash cards is growing quickly. Today, enterprise class SSDs are close to 1TB with more dense offerings to come later this year.
Most SSDs come with 5 year warranties today. There is still a lot of room for longevity improvements, but the advancements have been significant and will continue.
Putting all three of the above together, for a slightly higher price, a user can have an all flash system compared to a hybrid system for their primary workloads. Customers are willing to pay an incremental 10 – 15 per cent if it means an all-flash system that meets their critical app performance needs.

2015 will see the completion of the acquisition of pure flash vendors by the industry’s dominant players, and those that are not acquired must be able to survive on their own.