With the amount of data being produced today, it is imperative for enterprises to properly store, manage and protect their data. In the first quarter of 2018, the worldwide enterprise storage market grew 34.4 percent to US$13 billion, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC). Demand for public cloud resources and global enterprise infrastructure were named as two important drivers for new enterprise storage investments.
Additionally, the increasing volume of digital data; increasing proliferation of smartphones, laptops and tablets; and growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) market are driving growth in the next-generation data storage market, based on a report by Marketsandmarkets.
“It’s a fact that big data, security and IT applications generate massive amounts of sensitive data, and capturing, protecting and
Brandon Reich,
VP of Security and IoT,
Pivot3
mobilizing this data is paramount,” said Brandon Reich, VP of Security and IoT at
Pivot3.
“Right now, video is the most prominent big data application in the world. With the influx of data being collected at a rapid rate, we as an industry have to help organizations capture, analyze and leverage the data that is most important to them,” Reich explained. “Because video capture is growing at a rapid rate, there is a growing need for solutions that support larger security and IoT deployments of 500 terabytes or more. These platforms provide the performance, resiliency, scalability and ease of use that is required for large-scale environments at a lower cost than any other enterprise solution.”
As such, solutions that are designed for data-intensive environments, such as IP video surveillance and enterprise IT applications, are ideal choices to protect and ensure availability of critical video surveillance data.
Data storage options
When it comes to types of storage available in the market, there are several options — from local solutions, including direct-attached storage (DAS), network-attached storage (NAS) and storage area networks (SANs) to cloud storage. There are also different mediums of storage to choose from: mainly hard disk drives and solid state drives, which are also divided into different capacities and processing powers depending on the application usage scenarios, explained Bob Yang, Regional VP of APAC Sales for
Seagate Technology.
“Each of these solutions has their advantages depending on the application need, but the most forward-thinking organizations have realized there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution,” Yang said. “Organizations need to understand their current and future needs based on their data usage and growth, to build an infrastructure with the best mix of solutions.”
When it comes to what type of storage each application should implement, Yang says there is no hard and fast rule especially since we are in a time when the ways data is created and used will continue to shift. “Accordingly, an organization’s data storage needs will evolve, depending on its growth and the type of data it needs to manage.”
With wider usage of new technologies such as IoT, artificial intelligence (AI) and edge computing across different industries, the market has witnessed a continuous shift toward cloud storage. “There will also be a steady increase in the amount of data stored in enterprise data and control centers to power the global datasphere, many of which will be cloud based, with data processed by public cloud data centers estimated to double to 26 percent by 2025,” Yang said.
All of this means organizations will need data management infrastructure that can preserve data for the long haul while also providing their employees and users with rapid access and performance. “Organizations must build their central cloud computing architecture to stream, store and secure a huge amount of data, while strengthening their data processing and analyzing ability at the edge,” Yang added.
Although large traditional data centers have been the mainstay of computing and connectivity networks for more than half a century, all processing of transactions have been carried out in a centralized core. These trends mean that organizations will increasingly add edge elements to this essential core, according to Yang. “Edge-driven systems will work alongside cloud and the huge data center model will still thrive and be vital to all kinds of businesses.”