Technology Trends: Clouds Is Calling

The network storage landscape has been disrupted irreversibly by cloud service providers who are there to stay and co-exist with incumbents.

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With the digital age already upon us, the connected world is becoming ultra-connected. While diskattached storage (DAS) continues to be an integral part of the PCs and other access devices, it is almost a redundancy and is there as if by some sort of IT habit.

All enterprise data today rests on the network, of one form or the other. In fact, with the cloud becoming more and more mainstream, the traditional paradigm of on-premise network storage systems and subsystems is being challenged. As enterprises need to deal with a multitude of big data, its legacy network storage systems are actually faced with limitations, thus accelerating the shift to cloud.

Technology Trends

Cloud storage is very much in vogue, so much so that it has started putting pressures on the revenues of incumbent storage vendors like EMC, NetApp, HP, Dell and Brocade among others, who have been in the business of building storage systems like network attached storage (NAS) and storage area networks (SANs).

Moreover, public and hybrid cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services, on account of their hyper scales, have been able to commoditize storage in an unprecedented manner and offer it as a service. This makes the whole proposition look even more attractive to enterprises, as it adds some real teeth to their mobility strategies.

Of late, storage vendors have looked more closely and seriously at ‘flash storage’as a means to bring back some spark to storage arrays. According to IDC, adoption and acceptance of hybrid flash arrays across organizations to meet both capacity and performance demands in a single box is on the rise. Adoption of all flash arrays has also gained momentum across organizations for workloads like OLTP, BI, Billing and VDI.