2017 was the year of worldwide memory shortages and price spikes. Here’s what the industry predicts for 2018.

 

Demand for flash memory is estimated to be growing over 45% year over year.

 

By the end of 2018, 3D NAND will achieve the majority of the market, with full capacity expected from the new 3D NAND fabrication facilities, relieving the shortage of NAND flash that hit the market late 2016 through 2017. This should offer some relief in NAND flash prices, which doubled between 2016 and the peak in 2017. However, prices lower than those in early 2016 may not occur again until 2019, or possibly later.

 

Several analysts expect that as a result NAND flash prices per TB of storage will decline between 20-30% from 2017 to 2018. SSDs became the largest consumer of NAND flash, starting in Q1 2017, surpassing smart phones. The movement from consumer products to client and enterprise products should help moderate the traditional NAND flash price cyclicality. Enterprise SSDs showed particular growth in 2017, with 150% y/y growth in shipped capacity. With declining NAND flash prices, 2018 should see increasing demand for NAND flash, particularly in the Enterprise market, where NAND flash is rapidly becoming primary storage in large storage arrays.

 

This is important, because 2018 is poised to be a year if unprecedented growth in the storage market.

 

Higher resolution video with higher dynamic range and more cameras are driving storage demand as is the growth of IoT devices and applications. While IoT data itself is short-term, the analytics that run on IoT edge devices, such as HPE Edgeline 4000, will create analytics data that will need to be protected long-term with low-cost storage solutions. It is also widely anticipated that 2018 will see a spike in the rise of metadata where storage arrays store both the data itself and interesting metadata about that data with a need for the metadata to be indexed and searchable.

 

The increase in the number of sensors, including cameras and the need for rapid processing of this data is creating a greater need for local and network edge storage as well as storage in big data centers (the cloud). Artificial intelligence and lowering costs for high-performance storage are driving new storage hierarchies. Flash will become primary storage for many applications in 2018 with object-based secondary storage and archiving roles in many data centers. At HPE, this challenge is being met by joining the Apollo storage platform with Qumulo file system software. Qumulo creates computing nodes on the Apollo platform, forming a cluster that has scalable performance and a single, unified file system. An Apollo/Qumulo solution can scale to billions of files and costs less than legacy storage appliances.

 

Even with the development of memory-centric computing technology, the need to move large amounts of data around data centers will increase. This will also drive the use of flash memory primary storage, driving hard disk drive storage into secondary storage applications that focus on the costs of storage and don’t require fast data rates.

 

Data security and privacy will be major drivers of storage investment in 2018. The rash of ransomware episodes as well as hacking data theft incidents in 2017 showed the general vulnerability of many enterprise environments. Many companies are touting various backup storage solutions as providing protection from ransomware. We see tape gaining respect as a valued element of many data protection solutions because it offers an offline “air-gapped” backup copy as well as Appliance solutions, like the HPE StoreOnce, that can be secured from encryption.

 

2017 saw NVMe firmly established as the technology that will transform solid-state storage systems and leading to flash memory as primary storage for many applications in 2018. Overall storage demand will continue to drive growth in stored capacity in all the major storage products: flash memory, HDDs and magnetic tape, with most of this growth in public and private cloud infrastructures. Data security and privacy will be major drivers for enterprise storage investment in 2018.

 

Wrapping up, all signs point to exciting new applications hitting the market in 2018 that will require a storage-demand surge. Good news is that supply should be protected by the rapid advances in 3D NAND flash.

I’m sure there will be no surprised reaction when I state that we live in a data driven world. For proof you have to look no further than the people around you as you go throughout your day. Unless you’re hiking through the desert, you’re going to see many people with their heads down, looking at their smartphones as the read and send emails, texts, and tweets. From this same smartphone they will search for information, store notes, review documents, and the list goes on and on (what can’t a smartphone do these day?!)

 

Here’s the thing about this: All of the information they are creating and accessing is stored somewhere. It is this unabated demand for immediate and reliable data access that has created an unprecedented evolution in Storage technology. And it is the technology industry’s response (an explosion of Storage options) that makes the task of choosing your next Storage Array so difficult.

 

As businesses look to refresh their storage technology today, they are met with a dizzying menu of features including thin provisioning, deduplication, compression, iSCSI, File, Fibre Channel, All Flash, Hybrid, Tiering, etc.

 

Of course, the question is which of these features will be relevant for any given environment. The final answers will, of course, vary by environment. However, even after you’ve assessed your needs and ranked your requirements, you will still be faced with an increasingly crowded field of solution options from both established manufacturers and those who are new to the industry.

 

In my view, if you aren’t including HPE 3PAR StoreServ in your short-list, you may want to reconsider. Not only is HPE an established manufacturer, the 3PAR StoreServ is a mature array family and will match all the features/functionality of its competitors.

 

What’s more, the family of arrays included in the StoreServ solutions include options that will fit price/performance for Entry level, Midrange, and Enterprise arrays – all of these with the same features and functionalities. Furthermore, you’ll find both All Flash and Hybrid models to suit your requirements.

 

Here are just a few of the features and functionality you’ll find in the HPE 3PAR StoreServ family:

 

• Thin Provisioning – Up to 50% reduction in your storage footprint if you are fully provisioned today.
• Dynamic Optimization – The ability to migrate entire volumes to different tiers or RAID levels non-disruptively.
• Adaptive Optimization – The ability to migrate volumes at the sub-volume level based on policies you choose. This too is done non-disruptively.
• Deduplication – The ability to eliminate duplicate blocks and reduce storage footprint, in addition to what Thin Provisioning provides.
• Federation – The ability to migrate volumes/workloads across arrays non-disruptively.
• Priority Optimization – The ability to prioritize IOPS, Throughput, and Latency on a per volume basis.
• Data Encryption – Encryption of data-at-rest.
• File Persona – Serve data via CIFS and NFS directly from the array.
• Fibre Channel and iSCSI
• Detailed Reporting
• Application Integration – For Vmware, Hyper-V, SQL, Exchange, and Oracle.

 

And, if you want some validation of how well the 3PAR Family stacks up against its competition, you may want to look at the publications from DCIG, Storage Magazine, Gartner, and TechTarget. Links to these publications and more detailed information about the HPE 3PAR StoreServ can be found at www.hpe.com/us/en/storage/3par.html.

 

And, of course, Zunesis is ready to help you understand the benefits of 3PAR for your environment. In fact, if you’d like to spend some time on a 3PAR array, we have three HPE 3PAR StoreServ arrays in our Lab and would love to host you for a POC in our Englewood, CO facility. Please contact us if you are interested in taking a closer look at this technology.