The disappearing tier

So how many Storage Tiers will we have ?

It really depends on the person you ask.
I will give you my general view which coincides quite nicely with the above attached article.

First of all - We will have one less Tier.
Though IBM , EMC and other Tier-1s still bring out new products , there is a clear decline in that Tier.
EMC has seen an on-going decline which is not seasonal in any case.
Same is seen in IBM and other players.

On the other hand, we see immense growth for AFAs as market grew beyond 11B$ in 2014 and in 2015 the growth was faster than anticipated with EMC (XtremeIO) and Pure Storage leading the market.

So, what do we see here ?

On the one hand customers fleeing away from Traditional Tier-1.
On the other hand Flash embraced in the DataCenter as a member of honor.
We do know however, that flash still costs a bunch more than traditional Tier-1 storage (Leave aside all dedup, compression and other magic which still eventually leaves $/GB more expensive on flash with most scenarios).

The birth of a new Tier .... not really

The vast majority of the data just moved from Tier-1 to 2 seperate Tiers.
Those 2 tiers (Tier-0, i.e. FLASH, Tier-2, i.e. Archive) consist of all the data in the datacenter.
We discussed AFA above.

But what is the second one ?
Traditionally below Tier-1 storage(based off of a mix between 7K , 10K HDDS and SATA SSDs used for metadata)  would reside Tier-2 with TAPE or Optical disc.

Nowadays the Archive storage (another name for Tier-2) is becoming pricewise much closer to tape, especially with technologies like SMR and coming HAMR.

On the other hand the performance is much better than either tape or optical.
Data retrieval is becoming trivial and data management is very straightforward, which lowers the TCO VS Tape or Optical Disc.

We see  HGST coming with Active Archive (5.8PB machine) in 42 U rack , DDN with WOS , HDS with Object Storage Solutions and others.

So what can we conclude?
Tier-1s - Going down.
Tier-2 - Getting faster and cheaper.
Tier-0 - Is the new king of the DC.

Comments, thoughts, like, claps, are all highly welcome.