Storage Trends in 2019 - Toshiba Electronics Forecast

Where are we going to store this much data? Thanks to engineers and programmers, the capacity of disk media is becoming more and more, and combining them into efficient storage systems & ndash; easier. Thus, the problems we face today have become easier to solve. But with forecasts for the rapid acceleration of data generation by machines such as autonomous vehicles and smart factories, and considering that humans have already created huge amounts of data, including backups, can we produce enough storage for the needs of the next decade? ? Or will we have to think about a more ruthless approach and make decisions about what not to store?

Reiner Kese, Senior Storage Business Development Manager, Toshiba Electronics Europe

Balance HDD and SSD in a world of growing data

The volume of data stored in the world not only continues to grow, but is growing faster than predicted. It was expected that the share of data stored on flash and solid state drives would increase, while the amount of data stored on hard drives and tape would decrease. Today, however, it is clear that all three technologies continue to evolve simply because there are so many storage capacities required. It can be assumed that in 2019 90% of the capacity for typical applications using cloud computing will be provided by hard drives, possibly partly on tape. And only 10% will be provided with SSD. But since

Enterprise SSDs are up to ten times more expensive per unit of capacity than hard drives, and the financial investment will be equal: about 50% will be spent on hard drives and the same amount on solid-state drives. These storage systems cover the entire spectrum of applications. Some of them will use exclusively flash memory, some will be hybrid models, where the flash memory stores the cache or `` hot '' ones. data, and hard drives - "cold" and "warm" data, the rest - servers based exclusively on hard drives.

Helium HDD capacity will grow to ~ 20 TB

All three major manufacturers have already introduced helium hard drive models with capacities up to 16TB. Capacity is expected to grow by about 2TB per year in the coming years, which means 20TB hard drives should arrive early in the next decade. These drives are likely to lose value as capacity grows, but other technical parameters should not be improved. The only exception will be energy consumption, which will be reduced by using helium. While air-filled 3.5-inch hard drives running at 7200 rpm consume a relatively constant 11 W power regardless of capacity, the power consumption of helium-filled hard drives is approximately 6-7 W. This is the result of lower friction due to the lightness of helium. Thus, the proliferation of helium hard drives will help solve the problem of growing data center power consumption.

Every watt of energy saved by these drives reduces the amount of energy required to run the data center, as well as less heat dissipated, making cooling more economical. Another effect of temperature reduction: Helium actuators are more reliable than air-filled actuators in continuous operation. This results in much fewer failures and longer service life. Further increases in storage density are also planned, thanks to technologies such as microwave magnetic recording (MAMR), which will be integrated into the hard drive's recording heads.

Storage architecture

We can look forward to continued growth in the top-load Rack storage sector due to capacity requirements. Although 60 bays in 4U format have become the standard today, enclosures have emerged that support 78 to 110 bays for 3.5-inch hard drives. Instead of hardware RAID, this number of disks is configured using software solutions. Modern software-defined storage systems will continue to dominate, along with scalable designs such as Ceph clusters where multiple storage servers are bundled into larger blocks. Here, data protection is no longer provided by the surplus of hard drives on the server. Instead, the surplus is implemented through the storage server nodes available on the server network.

Explosive data growth

Already today, people generate a huge amount of data. Considering that this data is then backed up in data centers and in the cloud, this only increases the amount of storage required to store it. Today, the amount of machine-generated data is relatively small. This will change from 2019, however, as solutions and technologies such as autonomous cars, smart factories, Internet of Things (IoT) and home automation will generate additional streams of data that will need to be stored. The expected volume is so great that the current storage philosophy requires a major revision. The harsh reality is that we need to analyze the data before storing it in order to determine which ones are really important and cannot be deleted.

Artificial intelligence, deep learning and blockchain

New computing applications such as artificial intelligence, deep learning and blockchain have dramatically increased the performance requirements of data processing systems. We can expect these technologies to generate much more data and require storage solutions. It is currently unclear exactly what impact they will have on storage requirements, as not enough is known about the applications themselves and how they will be implemented. However, as 2019 and the next decade approach, the situation will become clearer. It is already clear today that these technologies will further increase the amount of stored data.

Reiner Kese
17/01.2019