Cloudy future or data storage system in the coming year
At the beginning of the new year, I would like to reflect on the year that has passed and on the year to come. It is obvious that the IT market has already turned towards mobile and cloud technologies, social networks and technologies for the so-called big data. The movement from the mainframe to the PC turned back, but in the direction of the distributed Web data centers. For example, my newly acquired Wi-Fi router from Cisco is already in the cloud, Synology's home storage system offers to configure cloud storage, and the phone and tablet back up somewhere on the Internet. The growth of these areas in 2013, and write specialists from IDC , and from Gartner .
As in 2012, in the area of ​​consumer devices, the PC market continues to fall, the main players will be smartphones and tablets; in the field of Web data centers, the main direction is the analysis of user behavior in the network and processing large amounts of data (BigData), virtualization in the field of enterprise.
Judging by the December release of IDC , in 2013, global IT costs will reach $ 2.1 trillion, which is 5.7% more than in 2012. At the same time, the amount of data as well as the volume of network traffic continues to grow, more and more people and companies are using an increasing number of devices, sharing media online - the growth is 40-50% per year on a global scale. This phenomenon in 2012 was named data deluge, which has not yet been translated into Russian by the same capacious definition. This data deluge or “data avalanche gap” makes it necessary for owners of data centers, mobile networks and devices to solve complex problems, such as application performance, latency of storage response and data center.
')
Another powerful growth driver, I think, is the further intellectualization of mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, readers), this market segment will grow (according to analysts) by 20% in 2013, generating 57% growth in the entire industry. Despite some skeptical articles on the fact that many users do not actually use their smartphones even by 10%, continuing to use only the phone, this is still not entirely true. The Internet and social networks, thanks to smartphones, are gaining more and more users in the world, continue to generate traffic.
All this is quite interesting, but, given the specifics of my work, I would like to turn a closer look at the storage system. There are a number of trends that have emerged during 2011-2012. For example, a growing number of Russian Web data centers are switching to HBA / SAS from RAID / SATA technologies. External storage systems (if any) are replaced with JBOD, often with an SSD inside. The enterprise segment continues to virtualize everything and everyone, while A-brands are still strong in the province in the absence of specialists who can design a solution for cheaper and often more flexible Whitebox solutions. What awaits us in 2013? I want to see at least one glance at the future ...
More and more suppliers offer their customers servers and storage systems together as cloud modular building blocks for new data centers. In both Europe and Russia, we see that such suppliers increasingly specialize in such solutions, leaving some other areas of their activities aside. This is especially true for large companies, as investing in the implementation of the supporting blocks of the architecture is much more profitable than deploying complex networks acquired entirely (network, servers and SAN), for which special staff is required. Many large IT consumers have announced the construction of cloud or block (similar in architecture but closed) data center. Despite this, inherited software continues to be one of the most important obstacles to this movement.
Virtualization of storage as part of the SAN infrastructure remains a priority for many IT vendors. At the same time, in 2012, there was not a single leader in the storage virtualization market due to fluctuations between the implementation of a Fiber Channel based SAN and IP converged networks. The ultimate goal in 2013 is likely to be the focus of storage for applications with multiple fail-safe copies in different places. In 2013, I anticipate some expansion of White Box integrators and server manufacturers to the regions. The market of Moscow and St. Petersburg is already saturated, while in the regions there is still potential for growth.
Large corporations think more carefully about what they are going to acquire, how flexible and cost-effective will be the mega data centers. Small data centers that have embraced server virtualization are beginning to move into the clouds, many large software companies are launching their cloud services. Industry leaders (a good example - Microsoft with its cloud office) have released such solutions for a long time. A good example for our market can be leaders in the field of financial accounting, 1C and SKB-contour. Both offer to abandon their own servers and use the services of their data centers. Of course, not everyone is ready to entrust the data of their companies to the Internet, but the movement to transfer part of SMB to the cloud is obvious. The risks of hosting servers in Russia, the shortcomings of our legislation, as well as our law enforcement practice, sometimes lead to the fact that some Russian and Ukrainian companies prefer to build their DCs on sites abroad. There are examples of building such DCs by our co-operations in Europe and the USA.
The industry and the computer ecosystem are ready to make the world fully interconnected and provide solutions for computing tasks that were previously concentrated in the data centers of huge computer systems and mainframes. The network is quickly becoming a huge part of our life, ways of communication and work. There are more and more people claiming that they can work regardless of geographic location, having a laptop at hand, and sometimes a tablet with a smartphone. Personally, I have several colleagues who have moved to warm countries and continue to work from there.
It seems that the entire Internet has become one big data repository, especially on the mobile front. YouTube, Flikr, Facebook, Dropbox, Skype ... The United States, of course, has gone far ahead, but Russia is far from the last place, ahead of Europe.
In this regard, it is worth mentioning BigData. Online stores, search engines, social networks and other web companies continue to look for ways to analyze the behavior of their users. Hadoop and Hadoop-like applications in 2012 became the most discussed technologies in the field of file systems. In the architecture of such solutions, as in the architecture of storage solutions in HPC, decentralization is also worth it. Despite this, we still live in the world of the 70-80s, we continue to use the EXT and NTFS file systems and the NFS and CIFS file access protocols 20-30-40 years old. pNFS doesn’t really develop, and the last CIFS refresh from Microsoft in 2012m server doesn’t answer the question of what's next. Scale-Out NAS continues to be quite an interesting technology, despite the “half-heartedness” of the solution to the problem of decentralization of storage.
Each storage vendor now offers SSD for its storage arrays, often offering hybrid solutions, in the array of which both SSD and HDD are used simultaneously. Server manufacturers offer SSDs within their servers and blade systems. The PCI SSD market and the SSD accelerator market of existing external storage systems inside servers continue to grow. This is most relevant, as in the SMB domain, for large databases. Leading A-brands have incorporated such solutions into their product lines. In the area of ​​consumer devices, SSDs have already come into our lives. All modern ultrabooks are equipped with SSD, even my old DELL got a hybrid HDD using SSD cache. As prices continue to decline, while sizes continue to decrease, it is likely that solid-state memory will overtake mechanical memory in the near future for primary storage, and mechanical disks will go to the archive level and backup level.
As in 2012, in the area of ​​consumer devices, the PC market continues to fall, the main players will be smartphones and tablets; in the field of Web data centers, the main direction is the analysis of user behavior in the network and processing large amounts of data (BigData), virtualization in the field of enterprise.
Judging by the December release of IDC , in 2013, global IT costs will reach $ 2.1 trillion, which is 5.7% more than in 2012. At the same time, the amount of data as well as the volume of network traffic continues to grow, more and more people and companies are using an increasing number of devices, sharing media online - the growth is 40-50% per year on a global scale. This phenomenon in 2012 was named data deluge, which has not yet been translated into Russian by the same capacious definition. This data deluge or “data avalanche gap” makes it necessary for owners of data centers, mobile networks and devices to solve complex problems, such as application performance, latency of storage response and data center.
')
Another powerful growth driver, I think, is the further intellectualization of mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, readers), this market segment will grow (according to analysts) by 20% in 2013, generating 57% growth in the entire industry. Despite some skeptical articles on the fact that many users do not actually use their smartphones even by 10%, continuing to use only the phone, this is still not entirely true. The Internet and social networks, thanks to smartphones, are gaining more and more users in the world, continue to generate traffic.
All this is quite interesting, but, given the specifics of my work, I would like to turn a closer look at the storage system. There are a number of trends that have emerged during 2011-2012. For example, a growing number of Russian Web data centers are switching to HBA / SAS from RAID / SATA technologies. External storage systems (if any) are replaced with JBOD, often with an SSD inside. The enterprise segment continues to virtualize everything and everyone, while A-brands are still strong in the province in the absence of specialists who can design a solution for cheaper and often more flexible Whitebox solutions. What awaits us in 2013? I want to see at least one glance at the future ...
More and more suppliers offer their customers servers and storage systems together as cloud modular building blocks for new data centers. In both Europe and Russia, we see that such suppliers increasingly specialize in such solutions, leaving some other areas of their activities aside. This is especially true for large companies, as investing in the implementation of the supporting blocks of the architecture is much more profitable than deploying complex networks acquired entirely (network, servers and SAN), for which special staff is required. Many large IT consumers have announced the construction of cloud or block (similar in architecture but closed) data center. Despite this, inherited software continues to be one of the most important obstacles to this movement.
Virtualization of storage as part of the SAN infrastructure remains a priority for many IT vendors. At the same time, in 2012, there was not a single leader in the storage virtualization market due to fluctuations between the implementation of a Fiber Channel based SAN and IP converged networks. The ultimate goal in 2013 is likely to be the focus of storage for applications with multiple fail-safe copies in different places. In 2013, I anticipate some expansion of White Box integrators and server manufacturers to the regions. The market of Moscow and St. Petersburg is already saturated, while in the regions there is still potential for growth.
Large corporations think more carefully about what they are going to acquire, how flexible and cost-effective will be the mega data centers. Small data centers that have embraced server virtualization are beginning to move into the clouds, many large software companies are launching their cloud services. Industry leaders (a good example - Microsoft with its cloud office) have released such solutions for a long time. A good example for our market can be leaders in the field of financial accounting, 1C and SKB-contour. Both offer to abandon their own servers and use the services of their data centers. Of course, not everyone is ready to entrust the data of their companies to the Internet, but the movement to transfer part of SMB to the cloud is obvious. The risks of hosting servers in Russia, the shortcomings of our legislation, as well as our law enforcement practice, sometimes lead to the fact that some Russian and Ukrainian companies prefer to build their DCs on sites abroad. There are examples of building such DCs by our co-operations in Europe and the USA.
The industry and the computer ecosystem are ready to make the world fully interconnected and provide solutions for computing tasks that were previously concentrated in the data centers of huge computer systems and mainframes. The network is quickly becoming a huge part of our life, ways of communication and work. There are more and more people claiming that they can work regardless of geographic location, having a laptop at hand, and sometimes a tablet with a smartphone. Personally, I have several colleagues who have moved to warm countries and continue to work from there.
It seems that the entire Internet has become one big data repository, especially on the mobile front. YouTube, Flikr, Facebook, Dropbox, Skype ... The United States, of course, has gone far ahead, but Russia is far from the last place, ahead of Europe.
In this regard, it is worth mentioning BigData. Online stores, search engines, social networks and other web companies continue to look for ways to analyze the behavior of their users. Hadoop and Hadoop-like applications in 2012 became the most discussed technologies in the field of file systems. In the architecture of such solutions, as in the architecture of storage solutions in HPC, decentralization is also worth it. Despite this, we still live in the world of the 70-80s, we continue to use the EXT and NTFS file systems and the NFS and CIFS file access protocols 20-30-40 years old. pNFS doesn’t really develop, and the last CIFS refresh from Microsoft in 2012m server doesn’t answer the question of what's next. Scale-Out NAS continues to be quite an interesting technology, despite the “half-heartedness” of the solution to the problem of decentralization of storage.
Each storage vendor now offers SSD for its storage arrays, often offering hybrid solutions, in the array of which both SSD and HDD are used simultaneously. Server manufacturers offer SSDs within their servers and blade systems. The PCI SSD market and the SSD accelerator market of existing external storage systems inside servers continue to grow. This is most relevant, as in the SMB domain, for large databases. Leading A-brands have incorporated such solutions into their product lines. In the area of ​​consumer devices, SSDs have already come into our lives. All modern ultrabooks are equipped with SSD, even my old DELL got a hybrid HDD using SSD cache. As prices continue to decline, while sizes continue to decrease, it is likely that solid-state memory will overtake mechanical memory in the near future for primary storage, and mechanical disks will go to the archive level and backup level.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/166071/
All Articles