Musings on Data Storage

The holidays already seem like a distant memory and, on this cold and wet winter day, I needed to remind myself of all the good things that are happening within the data storage world. COVID has finally loosened its grip on infrastructure budgets and strikes in the entertainment markets have been resolved. There are a lot or positive signs for growth in 2024 and beyond. Here’s a couple of things that I keep coming back to that will drive that growth.

Data protection.

I could probably just stop there and have said enough. Time and again when I chat with people in the industry, data protection is always the first thing that people want to talk about. A close second would be data availability, but that’s really just the other side of the same coin.

Most businesses have been impacted directly, or indirectly, by ransomware and loss of services already. Yes, even companies that make products that are supposed to protect us from this kind of malfeasance. What’s interesting to me is that the proliferation of these kinds of attacks is changing the direction of conversations about data protection. People are starting to realize that accessibility and protection are, if not mutually exclusive, at least in a state of constant tension. People are getting more comfortable talking about “when” something bad is going to happen rather than in terms of “if” something will happen.

All of this is a healthy change in perspective and is driving innovation particularly in RAID protection and tape backup (yes, you read that right – tape). Both of these technologies were initially developed in the early days of data storage. They continue to provide such dramatic benefits to storage infrastructure that almost every data center uses both even today. They are simple, and have been refined dramatically over the years. And like Rodney Dangerfield, they often don’t get enough respect as they quietly do more to assure data protection and availability than other, fancier options.

Software RAID can now provide protection where there aren’t performance penalties for securing large capacity arrays. Also, improvements in drive technologies have mitigated much of the overhead so that we’re now able to talk about seamlessly protecting petabytes of information with RAID. Similarly, improvements in tape technology have gotten to the point where swapping tapes and restore times are rarely mentioned. And tape offers the one thing that nothing else can – an air gap, which is the single most effective strategy in recovering from “when” an attack happens.

People are talking less about performance. There was a time not too long ago where performance was king. It was the one network bottleneck that system administrators would pay almost obscene amounts of money to eliminate. And now – it’s seems like we’re in a period where “good enough” is good enough. It’s not that people are settling for less, it’s just that the baseline is now so good that other challenges are exposed as the weak link. Investments are slowly evolving data centers as they replace SAS drives with NVMe technology. This will happen because, yes, NVMe has a performance advantage, but it’s also starting to make economic sense for even the laggards in the market. The total costs of technology choices are becoming easier to measure and, when things like power consumption and cost/byte transferred are now easily understood, the transition to NVMe just makes good business sense.

I think that in the coming year, we’ll hear less about performance as people focus on things like … data center flexibility and micro-appliances. No, the Raspberry Pi isn’t taking over the world (although …). But storage is evolving to the point where data centers can count on core building blocks carrying most of the load with focused, cost-effective appliances filling in the gaps. For example, let’s look at tape backups again. The core building block – typically an LTO-8 or LTO-9 tape these days – is exactly what’s needed from the perspective of backup capabilities. But then we need it to work across the network. In the past, this called for expensive, complicated network technologies like Fibre Channel that talked “block,” or setting up costly, support-draining servers to bridge the gap. Now there are simple, inexpensive micro-appliances available that allow LTO tape drives to be hooked up to a standard Ethernet network easily and without breaking the bank. I see similar advances across the network and believe that we’ll be hearing much more about micro-appliances for backup as well as in other areas in the coming year.

Thanks for listening to my storage musings. Looking forward to seeing what storage has in store for us (see what I did there?) this year and beyond. I’m always surprised, which is why I love this market so much!