Key trends in storage and networking for 2012

06 Jan 2012

The digital universe is expanding at an unprecedented rate. To enable corporate networks to cope, IT teams will need to deploy the right technologies and some creative thinking, says Adam Winkelmann, vice president of international operations at Emulex.

Data is constantly expanding and evolving to meet the needs of today’s organisations. The data that companies produce and retain has become richer, with more video and high-resolution imagery sitting alongside more conventional documents and spreadsheets.

As a result, the reliance on both enterprise storage and networks has grown to levels never before experienced in most working environments. According to IDC, the digital universe will expand by almost 50 percent by 2015 as data volumes skyrocket from 1.8 zettabytes (ZB) to 8 ZB, with 90 percent of that coming from digital content in the form of graphics and video.

Digital video, image creation and replication are a pivotal driving force in both networking and storage investment growth, illustrated by increasing use of high-resolution photography and high-definition video on websites, blogs and social networking services such as Twitter and Facebook. This move towards ubiquitous visual communication is deluging networks and data centres, creating opportunities for those that can manage, analyse unstructured information and deliver it in an efficient manner.

We see the following five key trends behind this growth in storage and networking for 2012: big data, latency reduction, end-to-end management capabilities, content delivery and mobility, and the convergence of networks.

1. Big data in the cloud. One of the most significant new trends is the growth of ‘Big Data’ using the Hadoop model. Apache Hadoop is a software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications under a free licence. It enables applications to work with thousands of nodes and petabytes of data, making it the ideal platform for heavy-duty data distribution, such as video streaming and replication.
2. Lowering latency with Solid State Disks (SSDs). SSDs and flash memory are being used at every layer of IT infrastructure to accelerate applications, speed up loading and caching times, and scale the number of concurrent users that can be supported. SSDs are making applications such as Netflix and Facebook scale faster to support hundreds of millions of users concurrently across the globe. New networking models such as OpenFlow, alongside SSD, are supporting this expanding storage universe.
3. End-to-end management. A new generation of management tools is being deployed that can see from one end of the cloud to the other. They enable developers, carriers and IT managers to provide access to storage locally and remotely, creating one integrated storage pool to support mobile and virtual computing.
4. Mobile delivery. It is not enough to have vast pools of storage; data must be deliverable to mobile and remote devices. This is where new technology such as OpenStack help infrastructure providers move, map and optimise storage, networking and computing resources to deliver content across the globe.
5. Moving to one wire. Network convergence is bringing together Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NAS, IP and clustering in a single physical layer that can be shared and optimised to make the other trends we have outlined here possible. Without the right network, none of the other trends are viable. Key to network convergence will be10Gb Ethernet (10GbE), with the new Data Centre Bridging (DCB) enhancements.

It took mankind almost 60 years to go from 0 to 1.8 ZB and to think we will almost triple this storage universe by 2015 is amazing. All the technologies outlined above are key to this. One thing we have learned in IT is that no single technology does it all, but rather it is the combination of multiple technologies with the right creative people making it work.

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