2019: a turning point for storage?

[StorageExperts]

In the last decade, the storage industry has underpinned all major advances in business agility and digital transformation—with none more revolutionary than the introduction of the all-flash data center. As HPE's customers moved from "spinning rust" slow hard disk drives to HPE 3PAR and Nimble Storage all-flash platforms, their businesses were able to adapt in real time to the needs of their own customers and stakeholders. But what's next? And what will we see in 2019?

In 2019, the continuation of the adoption of real-time analytics from big data platforms and social media feeds will become even more critical to business and customer satisfaction. Organizations will start to investigate how artificial intelligence and machine learning advancements could revolutionize the services they deliver to customers. A deeper understanding of their customer's needs and preferences will be critical to being competitive in the ever changing business landscape. Blockchain applications will also grow in popularity and move into the mainstream. All of these drivers put increased stress and demands of the underlying compute and storage infrastructure serving these mission-critical applications.

So how will the storage industry respond to this?

First, here’s a history lesson. A number of years ago it was widely spouted across the industry that ISCSI would be the death of the "monolithic" Fibre Channel fabric. Soon after that Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) was the next contender to take on the challenge to win the hearts and minds of organizations’ storage strategists. Fast forward to today and its very clear that ISCSI has dominated the SMB space where cost is a major consideration and deployment of a separate fabric doesn't make sense. FCoE however continues to be either a siloed deployment due to a major vendor pushing this "lock-in" strategy or coexisiting with existing FC fabrics. However, the major fabric today still is Fibre Channel.

So why the history lesson? Well the new kid on the block (pun intended) for 2019 will be the emergence of NVMe Over Fabric (NVMe-oF). Fundamentally the NVMe protocol will replace SCSI across the fabric. NVMe as a protocol is extremely efficient and designed for the next 50 years of business applications compared to the aging and bloated SCSI command-set. Consider this question: When was the last time you had to configure a SCSI flatbed scanner? Yes, this was a requirement back in the 90s, but not today.

Like its predecessors before it, NVMe-oF in conjunction with storage platforms and operating system support promises to revolutionize business applications and their stakeholders ability to respond even faster than before. The reduction in application latency from milliseconds to microseconds will open the door to a world of possibilities for application developers and enterprise architects alike.

 Here comes the industry's lowest TCO and faster ROI 

The great news for HPE customers is that the deployment of NVMe-oF can be achieved on existing 16 Gb or 32 Gb Brocade fabrics. Coupled with future-proofed HPE 3PAR and HPE Nimble Storage all-flash arrays, organizatiosn will be able to take advantage of this technology advancement when it makes sense to do so.

2019 will have plenty of challenges ahead, however I'm confident in the intelligent storage strategy here at HPE—and how we are helping our customers deliver on their digital transformation strategies. All the best for the road ahead!

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Meet Around the Storage Block blogger Dan Yarrow. Hailing from Queensland, Australia, Dan has been a part of the HPE Sales Team since 2011. Professionally, he enjoys following emerging IT industry developments, speculating on how they might impact future trends and helping his customers solve real world problems.