January 17, 2013 at 01:54Cloud future or storage in the coming year
At the beginning of the new year, I want to reflect on the year that has passed and the coming year. It is obvious that the IT market has already turned towards mobile and cloud technologies, social networks and technologies for the so-called big data. The movement from mainframes to PC has turned back, but already towards distributed Web data centers. For example, my recently acquired Wi-Fi router from Cisco is already in the cloud, Synology's home storage system offers to configure cloud storage, and the phone and tablet back up somewhere to the Internet. The growth of these areas in 2013 was written by specialists from IDC and Gartner .
As in 2012, in the field of consumer devices, the PC market continues to fall, the main players will be smartphones and tablets; in the field of Web data centers, the main direction is the analysis of user behavior on the network and the processing of large amounts of data (BigData), virtualization in the field of enterprise.
Judging by the December release of IDC, in 2013, global IT spending reached $ 2.1 trillion, which is 5.7% more than 2012. At the same time, the amount of data as well as the volume of network traffic continues to grow, more and more people and companies use an increasing number of devices, share online media - growth is 40-50% per year on a global scale. This phenomenon in 2012 was called data deluge, which has not yet been translated into an equally comprehensive definition into Russian. This data deluge or “gap in the data avalanche” makes it difficult for owners of data centers, mobile networks and devices to solve complex problems, such as application performance, storage latency and data center latency.
Another powerful growth driver, it seems to me, is the further intellectualization of mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, readers), this market segment will grow (according to analysts) by 20% in 2013, generating 57% of the growth of the entire industry. Despite some skeptical articles about the fact that many users do not actually use their smartphones even at 10%, continuing to use only the phone, this is still not entirely true. Thanks to smartphones, the Internet and social networks are gaining more and more users in the world and continue to generate traffic.
All this is quite interesting, but, taking into account the specifics of my activity, I would like to draw a closer look at storage systems. There are a number of trends that have been outlined during 2011-2012. For example, an increasing number of Russian Web data centers are switching to HBA / SAS from RAID / SATA technologies. External storage (if any) is replaced with a JBOD, often with an SSD inside. The enterprise segment continues to virtualize everything and everyone, and A-brands are still strong in the province in the absence of specialists who can design the solution on cheaper and often more flexible Whitebox solutions. What awaits us in 2013? I want to see the future with at least one eye ...
More and more suppliers are offering their customers servers and storage together as cloud modular building blocks for new data centers. Both in Europe and in Russia, we see that such suppliers are increasingly specializing in such solutions, leaving some other areas of their activities aside. This is especially true for large companies, since investing in the implementation of the supporting blocks of the architecture is much more profitable than deploying complex networks acquired entirely (network, servers, and SANs), for the maintenance of which special personnel are required. Many large IT consumers have announced the construction of cloud or block (similar in architecture, but closed) data centers. Despite this, legacy software continues to be one of the main obstacles to this movement.
Storage virtualization as part of the SAN infrastructure remains a priority for many IT providers. At the same time, in 2012 not a single leader in the storage virtualization market appeared due to the fluctuation between the introduction of Fiber Channel-based SANs and IP converged networks. The ultimate goal in 2013 is likely to be the direction of storage to applications with multiple fail-safe copies in different places. In 2013, I expect some expansion of White Box integrators and server manufacturers in the regions. The market of Moscow and St. Petersburg is already saturated, while in the regions there is still potential for growth.
Large corporations ponder more carefully what they intend to acquire, how flexible and cost-effective mega data centers will be. Small data centers that embrace server virtualization are starting to move to the clouds, many large software companies are launching their cloud services. Industry leaders (Microsoft is a good example with its cloud office) have released such solutions quite a while ago. Leaders in the field of financial accounting, 1C and SKB-contour can become a good example for our market. Both offer to abandon their own servers and use the services of their data centers. Of course, not everyone is ready to trust the data of their companies to the Internet, but the movement towards the transition of part of SMB to the cloud is obvious. The risks of hosting servers in Russia, the shortcomings of our legislation, as well as our law enforcement practice, sometimes lead to that some Russian and Ukrainian companies prefer to build their DCs at sites abroad. There are examples of building such DCs by our companies in Europe and the USA.
The industry and the computer ecosystem are ready to make the world completely interconnected and provide solutions for computing tasks that were previously concentrated in the data centers of huge computer systems and mainframes. The network is fast becoming a huge part of our lives, ways of communication and work. More and more people are appearing, claiming that they can work regardless of geographic location, having a laptop and sometimes a tablet with a smartphone on hand. Personally, I have several colleagues who have moved to warm countries and continue to work from there.
It seems that the entire Internet has become one big data warehouse, especially on the mobile front. YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Dropbox, Skype ... The United States, of course, has gone far ahead, but Russia is far from last here, ahead of Europe.
In this regard, it is worth mentioning BigData. Online stores, search engines, social networks and other web companies continue to look for a way to analyze their users' behavior. Hadoop and Hadoop-like applications in 2012 became the most talked about file system technologies. In the architecture of such solutions, as well as in the architecture of storage solutions in HPC, decentralization also stands. Despite this, we still live in the world of the 70-80s, we continue to use the EXT and NTFS file systems and the NFS and CIFS file access protocols of 20-30-40 years ago. pNFS is not developing very well, and the latest CIFS refresher from Microsoft in the 2012 server does not provide an answer to the question what next. Scale-Out NAS continues to be a rather interesting technology, despite the "half" solution to the problem of decentralized storage.
Each storage provider now offers SSDs for its storage arrays, often offering hybrid solutions that use both SSDs and HDDs simultaneously. Server manufacturers offer SSDs as part of their servers and blade systems. The PCI SSD market and the SSD accelerator market of existing external storage inside servers continue to grow. This is most relevant, as in the field of SMB, for large databases. Leading A-brands have included such solutions in their product lines. In the field of consumer devices, SSDs have already tightly entered our lives. All modern ultrabooks are equipped with SSDs, even my old DELL got a hybrid HDD using SSD cache. As prices continue to decline and sizes continue to decline, there is a chance
As in 2012, in the field of consumer devices, the PC market continues to fall, the main players will be smartphones and tablets; in the field of Web data centers, the main direction is the analysis of user behavior on the network and the processing of large amounts of data (BigData), virtualization in the field of enterprise.
Judging by the December release of IDC, in 2013, global IT spending reached $ 2.1 trillion, which is 5.7% more than 2012. At the same time, the amount of data as well as the volume of network traffic continues to grow, more and more people and companies use an increasing number of devices, share online media - growth is 40-50% per year on a global scale. This phenomenon in 2012 was called data deluge, which has not yet been translated into an equally comprehensive definition into Russian. This data deluge or “gap in the data avalanche” makes it difficult for owners of data centers, mobile networks and devices to solve complex problems, such as application performance, storage latency and data center latency.
Another powerful growth driver, it seems to me, is the further intellectualization of mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, readers), this market segment will grow (according to analysts) by 20% in 2013, generating 57% of the growth of the entire industry. Despite some skeptical articles about the fact that many users do not actually use their smartphones even at 10%, continuing to use only the phone, this is still not entirely true. Thanks to smartphones, the Internet and social networks are gaining more and more users in the world and continue to generate traffic.
All this is quite interesting, but, taking into account the specifics of my activity, I would like to draw a closer look at storage systems. There are a number of trends that have been outlined during 2011-2012. For example, an increasing number of Russian Web data centers are switching to HBA / SAS from RAID / SATA technologies. External storage (if any) is replaced with a JBOD, often with an SSD inside. The enterprise segment continues to virtualize everything and everyone, and A-brands are still strong in the province in the absence of specialists who can design the solution on cheaper and often more flexible Whitebox solutions. What awaits us in 2013? I want to see the future with at least one eye ...
More and more suppliers are offering their customers servers and storage together as cloud modular building blocks for new data centers. Both in Europe and in Russia, we see that such suppliers are increasingly specializing in such solutions, leaving some other areas of their activities aside. This is especially true for large companies, since investing in the implementation of the supporting blocks of the architecture is much more profitable than deploying complex networks acquired entirely (network, servers, and SANs), for the maintenance of which special personnel are required. Many large IT consumers have announced the construction of cloud or block (similar in architecture, but closed) data centers. Despite this, legacy software continues to be one of the main obstacles to this movement.
Storage virtualization as part of the SAN infrastructure remains a priority for many IT providers. At the same time, in 2012 not a single leader in the storage virtualization market appeared due to the fluctuation between the introduction of Fiber Channel-based SANs and IP converged networks. The ultimate goal in 2013 is likely to be the direction of storage to applications with multiple fail-safe copies in different places. In 2013, I expect some expansion of White Box integrators and server manufacturers in the regions. The market of Moscow and St. Petersburg is already saturated, while in the regions there is still potential for growth.
Large corporations ponder more carefully what they intend to acquire, how flexible and cost-effective mega data centers will be. Small data centers that embrace server virtualization are starting to move to the clouds, many large software companies are launching their cloud services. Industry leaders (Microsoft is a good example with its cloud office) have released such solutions quite a while ago. Leaders in the field of financial accounting, 1C and SKB-contour can become a good example for our market. Both offer to abandon their own servers and use the services of their data centers. Of course, not everyone is ready to trust the data of their companies to the Internet, but the movement towards the transition of part of SMB to the cloud is obvious. The risks of hosting servers in Russia, the shortcomings of our legislation, as well as our law enforcement practice, sometimes lead to that some Russian and Ukrainian companies prefer to build their DCs at sites abroad. There are examples of building such DCs by our companies in Europe and the USA.
The industry and the computer ecosystem are ready to make the world completely interconnected and provide solutions for computing tasks that were previously concentrated in the data centers of huge computer systems and mainframes. The network is fast becoming a huge part of our lives, ways of communication and work. More and more people are appearing, claiming that they can work regardless of geographic location, having a laptop and sometimes a tablet with a smartphone on hand. Personally, I have several colleagues who have moved to warm countries and continue to work from there.
It seems that the entire Internet has become one big data warehouse, especially on the mobile front. YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Dropbox, Skype ... The United States, of course, has gone far ahead, but Russia is far from last here, ahead of Europe.
In this regard, it is worth mentioning BigData. Online stores, search engines, social networks and other web companies continue to look for a way to analyze their users' behavior. Hadoop and Hadoop-like applications in 2012 became the most talked about file system technologies. In the architecture of such solutions, as well as in the architecture of storage solutions in HPC, decentralization also stands. Despite this, we still live in the world of the 70-80s, we continue to use the EXT and NTFS file systems and the NFS and CIFS file access protocols of 20-30-40 years ago. pNFS is not developing very well, and the latest CIFS refresher from Microsoft in the 2012 server does not provide an answer to the question what next. Scale-Out NAS continues to be a rather interesting technology, despite the "half" solution to the problem of decentralized storage.
Each storage provider now offers SSDs for its storage arrays, often offering hybrid solutions that use both SSDs and HDDs simultaneously. Server manufacturers offer SSDs as part of their servers and blade systems. The PCI SSD market and the SSD accelerator market of existing external storage inside servers continue to grow. This is most relevant, as in the field of SMB, for large databases. Leading A-brands have included such solutions in their product lines. In the field of consumer devices, SSDs have already tightly entered our lives. All modern ultrabooks are equipped with SSDs, even my old DELL got a hybrid HDD using SSD cache. As prices continue to decline and sizes continue to decline, there is a chance