Due to the enormous amount of data, the demand for data storage in the enterprise sector is growing continuously. One reason for the growing amount of data is the trend towards home offices, which many companies have had to adopt, especially since the start of the Corona pandemic. In this area, companies are forced to move to cloud services so that they can serve their employees through shared resources. Cloud-based work usually takes place from multiple points-of-presence or co-location sites where employees work in a distributed manner. Networked devices and sensors are another challenge for enterprises. Smart cities, video surveillance, autonomous vehicles, and Industry 4.0 are the future in digitalization and at the same time data hungry. For companies, cloud providers and data center operators, this means having storage media available with which they can process the enormous amount of data quickly and cost-effectively.
SSDs and HDDs as cost-effective storage media
Most of the data to be processed finds its place on hard disks. Hard disks still offer the most cost-effective option for permanently storing data, both in the private sector and for companies. It is important here that the storage media have a long service life. Storage media that process data quickly are primarily SSD drives (solid state drives). Here, the price per gigabyte is falling more and more, but is currently still higher than the price of HDDs (hard disk drives). The development of HDDs is also progressing rapidly, which means that the storage capacity of hard disk drives is increasing further, for example through helium fillings. Modern drives now also have better methods for storing data, such as heat-assisted magnetic recording and microwave-assisted recording.
It should be noted that although SSDs, which run separately, are superior to HDDs in terms of speed, they are not sufficient as separately used storage media as storage capacity requirements grow. For data volumes in the enterprise sector, it is recommended to operate several hard disks in a network. This ensures that a high number of input/output operations per second (IOPS) is achieved, i.e. that a lot of data can be processed per second. Hard disks will therefore continue to have a significant influence on modern storage solutions in the future.
What other storage trends can be expected?
In addition to SSDs and HDDs, there are other types of storage that will determine the future of data storage.
Storage Class Memory (SCM): Storage Class Memory is a type of storage that is still quite new. This type of memory forms a middle layer in computers between the volatile main memory and the permanent hard disk memory, which is called storage. This middle layer makes it possible to significantly increase the performance of computer systems. In terms of speed, storage capacity and price, storage class memory is positioned between fast (but expensive) main memory and slower (but inexpensive) storage. In contrast to volatile main memory, data is permanently stored in storage class memory, i.e. even after the computer has been shut down or in the event of a power failure.
Flash memory: Flash memory is available in NAND and NOR versions. The memory can be electronically erased and programmed. The NAND and NOR flash memory stores and erases data block by block. This version is much faster at writing and reading memory than hard disks.
Storage Area Network (SAN): The Storage Area Network is a data storage network. This storage medium is ideal for storing large volumes of data. The storage is managed decentrally, which means it is independent of the location and the operating system. The storage is divided into virtual units. The storage is accessed by means of a server. SAN combines individual hard disks of the servers into a few large storage media, which are then available to all servers.
Improvement of Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe): NVMe is a specification for a protocol and logical interface to which non-volatile memory, such as SSDs, is connected via the PCI Express bus. This is why this type of specification is also called Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification (NVMHCIS). This makes drivers from specific manufacturers superfluous. The Non-Volatile Memory Express has been precisely adapted to the characteristics of memory devices that are flash-based. The advantages of the NVCMHCIS are the high speed, the possibility of many input and output operations, the low latency and the possibility of multithreading.
Improving Formative AI - Making Intelligent Use of Data
As the amount of data increases, so does the amount of data that contains valuable information and insights. As Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) continue to advance, it is now also possible to extract additional valuable information from archived data. Therefore, it is increasingly important for companies to train models to extract valuable information from data. This in turn increases the overall useful life of the data. Formative AI is able to extract the full potential from the data it gathers. In doing so, formative AI can intelligently and dynamically adapt to the situation. Together with the storage tiering trend, formative AI forms a combination that reacts intelligently as soon as changes occur in a flexibly built architecture.
Conclusion
In the future, enterprises will increasingly need to be prepared with different storage options for the ever-increasing volumes of data. The market for storage offerings is not standing still and is adapting to current and future trends. In the future, machine learning and artificial intelligence will continue to play a decisive role in ensuring that data and storage harmonize perfectly.
You can find future-proof and suitable storages for large data volumes here.