Every year, Spectra Logic gazes into the future and, after much research and thought, produces the comprehensive Data Storage Outlook report. Now in its seventh year, the document recaps industry accomplishments and forecasts future technology developments that will enable the world to access, manage, protect and preserve the world’s treasury of information.
One thing is clear – the demand for data storage is accelerating, with artificial intelligence, machine learning, internet of things, and data streaming necessitating advancements in storage capacity, performance, flexibility and sustainability. The 2022 Data Storage Outlook report examines today’s technologies, such as persistent memory, flash, magnetic disk, tape, optical, and cloud, as well as storage innovation on the horizon.
Highlights within the 2022 report include:
Flash:
- PCIe Gen 5 products are in earlier stages of announcement and promise speeds that exceed 10 GB/s.
- Innovations include the utilization 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 organizations 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 realization 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 six times 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.
To download Spectra Logic’s full “2022 Data Storage Outlook” report, visit here.
