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Top 10 storage and backup stories of 2017
In Computer Weekly’s top 10 storage stories of 2017, we tracked key trends such as the continued rise of hyper-converged infrastructure, the emergence of NVMe flash and object storage
The most prominent trend of 2017 in storage and backup was the rise of hyper-converged infrastructure.
First it emerged for primary use cases, with compute and storage in a single node that could be scaled out to build hyper-converged clusters. Then backup product makers started to sell appliances built on the same architecture.
Meanwhile, the next big thing in flash storage has been bubbling under. NVMe promises to unleash the potential of flash that has been locked in by protocols built for spinning disk. So far, however, the NVMe market is struggling to find maturity and an agreed way of overcoming key obstacles.
In the background, object storage continues its rise, while the industry looks ahead to what will supercede flash and potential new ways of doing cloud storage based on blockchain.
1. Nutanix, Simplivity and Pivot3 lead hyper-converged pack: Forrester
Hyper-converged was a big story in 2017 and is set to remain so in 2018. Here, Forrester rates 12 hyper-converged infrastructure providers according to products, company strategy and market presence, with Nutanix, Simplivity and Pivot3 coming out on top.
2. Colliers dumps Flexpods for Nutanix and Cohesity hyper-converged
Property firm Colliers replaces NetApp converged stacks with hyper-converged infrastructure. Hyper-converged secondary storage and backup from Cohesity replaces tape and supports Nutanix performance tier.
3. is hyper-converged the answer to the NVMe bottleneck?
As numerous storage suppliers try to come up with a way to provide shared storage based on NVMe while overcoming the bottleneck at the controller, this blog article from August takes stock of the approaches taken.
4. Hong Kong cloud firm tests Excelero NVMe for video analytics
Vivavo runs Excelero NVMesh NVMe storage at claimed near-bare metal performance to support real-time analytics for face and behaviour recognition on CCTV.
5. Iceland IT firm gets Cohesity hyper-converged backup boxes
Thekking scraps ageing IBM and HPE iron for Cohesity hyper-converged nodes with hybrid flash capacity to power deduplication for Veeam backups.
6. Rubrik plans backup and archive analytics on-premise and in cloud
An example of how backup products are changing. Not only are we seeing hyper-converged products, but suppliers are looking to exploit data captured in backup and archive operations to gain intelligence for the organisation.
7. Object storage will be ‘huge’ in stateless world of web and mobile
SNIA Europe director says traditional SAN and NAS are not built for the stateless world of web-based apps and workloads, with object storage set to become dominant.
8. 3D XPoint et al to force architecture and software changes
New solid state technologies such as 3D XPoint will be a second tier of memory, bringing change to hardware architectures and causing software to be rewritten, says SNIA solid state group chair.
9. Racetrack Memory products in five years, says IBM fellow
Millennium Prize winner Stuart Parkin says flash and 2D methods of storage are fatally limited – Racetrack Memory offers 100x the capacity without the wear issues of flash.
10. Could blockchain power private distributed cloud storage?
Already some companies allow customers to store data on the hard drives of strangers, encrypted and protected by blockchain, and at a fraction of the price of mainstream public cloud services. What future is there for distributed cloud storage?
