2017 is a turbulent year for the IT industry, but it is now accustomed to it. In 2018, there will be more turmoil, and industry consolidation, regulation and global competition will intensify.
Regardless of whether your company is striving to be at the forefront of IT, only by understanding these storage predictions and IT infrastructure trends in 2018 can you gain a competitive edge and make life easier.
First, storage articles
Storage device: the rise of NVMe
NVMe Solid State Drives (SSDs) are becoming mainstream, replacing SATA and SAS SSDs. Server OEMs have finally provided an excellent server platform for NVMe drives, which will help NVMe drives be adopted. Since the price of NVMe drives is only 5%-10% higher than the price of data center-level SATA SSDs, we expect the adoption rate to increase significantly in 2018. Customers can at least double the performance by a factor of -3 and reduce the latency by half.
Flash and DRAM out of stock are alleviated
In 2017, the shortage of flash memory and DRAM led to an increase in the cost of computer components using flash and DRAM (ie SSD and DIMM modules). The delivery time is extended, and the delivery time varies from manufacturer to manufacturer. It is a few days short, more than one month long, and sometimes longer when the amount is large.
New capacity is put into use in 2018, and we expect the shortage will be eased. In the second and third quarters of 2018, the price of NAND flash memory will drop moderately. This will further reduce the cost of SSD and flash-based storage systems and accelerate adoption.
Hybrid storage system
Due to the decline in flash memory costs, the SSD-HDD hybrid system will become less and less meaningful. HDD will enter a purely capacity-conscious use (price per GB is more important than performance). Performance-oriented applications will be served by flash-based systems. Flash-based storage systems will continue to expand in size and scope, leveraging the efficiency of low-cost NAND flash mining.
High-performance storage systems based on NVMe SSDs will begin to gain wider adoption. If you have the right storage system partner, you can now have a shared storage system as fast or faster as your local SSD.
The storage system will continue to be divided into two different categories. These two categories are systems that focus only on performance (regardless of other aspects), as well as systems that focus not only on performance, but also on end-to-end data integrity and all data characteristics (high availability, scalability, snapshots, and multi-site, etc.) .
Software Defined Storage (SDS) and Distributed Storage (DS) accelerate adoption
Although SDS is the second choice for new projects in 2016 (the first choice is traditional SAN or all-flash arrays), SDS became the first choice for many companies in 2017. We now see SDS and DS are widely used in data centers. In 2018, they will account for 30%-50% of newly deployed systems, and will accelerate in 2019.
In addition, SDS is typically used in larger projects (more than 50TB), and more than half of the deployment capacity is expected to be based on SDS in 2018.
SDS is also a basic storage tier for Hyper-converged Infrastructure (HCI) solutions, replacing mid-range and mid-range SANs and all-flash arrays.
SDS merger
The concept of "unified storage" (a product integration block storage / file storage / object storage) is becoming popular. Although this concept sounds good, the promised benefits are hard to come by. In fact, storage software requires a completely different architecture and implementation method to be very good in every use case.
In 2017, we saw signs of segmentation: Many vendors are starting to focus on what they are good at: whether it's block storage, file storage, or object storage. Customers and solution providers seem to understand that there may be two or three best-of-breed solutions in each storage tier to get the job done.
In 2018, we will continue to seek “single best†solutions. As technology matures, we will begin to see some obvious advantages for every use case and every technology stack.
Disaster recovery and workload movement are in growth mode
Integrated multi-site capabilities for disaster recovery, workload movement and backup will usher in a boom in 2018. This is a bit surprising, because most companies have already made backups, and everyone will think that disaster recovery is part of this plan. However, ever-increasing application complexity and business needs are driving a new wave of disaster recovery needs, while storage systems can provide virtually zero Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs).
Second, IT infrastructure articles
Calculation
Heterogeneous computing refers to the use of general-purpose CPUs and computing resources (such as GPUs and FPGAs) that are better at handling current tasks. This concept is more widely used in its traditional application areas: video and image processing (now increasingly used) Bitcoin and cryptocurrency mining, etc.). The main driver in this regard is the use of machine learning and data analysis to handle large volumes of structured and unstructured enterprise data.
Applications such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and the data analysis they need will be the main drivers of new IT infrastructure.
CPU
Intel Xeon Scalable is used in almost all new IT infrastructure projects (public, local, and other projects). Compared to the previous generation, it increases the density (the number of cores per server and the GB memory per server) by about 50% and significantly improves energy efficiency. This in turn brings better overall economic benefits to the virtualized infrastructure.
AMD Zen Microarchitecture (Epyc) has returned to the market and was recently announced to be deployed on Microsoft Azure. We expect to see further adoption in 2018.
Some companies are experimenting with ARM and Power Architecture servers. We anticipate that the use of ARM and Power Architecture CPUs will remain limited and limited to specific application areas. Compared to interactive/online (delay-driven) applications, ARM servers are better suited for batch processing (throughput-driven) applications.
Qualcomm recently broke into the server CPU market with 48 core CPUs.
Virtualization stack
The time has come to completely change the virtualization stack. On the one hand, KVM is fully capturing market share. This trend will continue unabated in 2018, with large and small vendors offering KVM-based HCI and rack-level architecture cloud solutions. On the other hand, containers (especially those managed by Kubernetes) bloom everywhere. We find that the entire virtualization stack is expected to change radically.
We expect the market share of other virtualization hypervisors to decline in 2018.
The internet
The adoption of 25/50/100GbE continues to exceed 10GbE. We predict that in 2018, more than 50% of new data center networks will use 25/50/100GbE instead of the old 10/40GbE standard.
Intel OmniPath has grown from a small use to a leader in the high performance computing (HPC) interconnect market. This is because the OmniPath adapter is now integrated into Intel's Xeon CPU. In 2018, we expect most of the new RDMA interconnect technology in HPC to be OmniPath. Due to the higher price/performance ratio than Ethernet, some deployments outside of HPC may choose OmniPath, but only for large-scale multi-rack scenarios: in this case, applications require extremely high performance between compute nodes.
InfiniBand will not disappear. It continues to be used for new HPC deployments. We believe that InfiniBand has no convincing use outside of HPC in 2018.
Data growth and application
According to a survey conducted by Seagate, IDC, the global data volume will increase to 16.3 billion ZB (that is, 1 trillion GB) by 2025, which is ten times that of the 16.1ZB data generated in 2016. This growth is mainly due to unstructured data, but structured data and core business applications are continually increasing data.
While a large percentage of this data comes from professional platforms (social media and specific hardware manufacturers, etc.), we expect a large number of new large private clouds, which will be a good target market for IT infrastructure providers.
Market development
We expect a new wave of consolidation in 2018, especially between server vendors and storage vendors.
According to IDC's survey, the adoption rate of the cloud is increasing, but there is still 25.09% of the funds used to build the public cloud. And the trend of cross-regional mergers between second and third tier cloud providers has been staged, and we expect this trend to continue.
On the other hand, the EU General Regulation on Data Protection (GDPR), which will take effect on May 25, 2018, will stimulate the public, private and hybrid cloud markets, making local markets more fragmented. We've seen data centers and cloud providers move workloads to local facilities just used in large markets to store and deliver data locally.
Asian manufacturers accelerate
We have already seen Asian well-known manufacturers such as Alibaba, Huawei, AIC and NEC take action and confront the American counterparts. We expect this trend to deepen in 2018, due to the large amount of cash and human resources invested by Asian manufacturers and an increasingly global vision.
Third, the outlook
2018 will be an exciting year for storage and IT infrastructure. There have been several major trends in the industry (GDPR regulation and the growing strength of Asian manufacturers), which are expected to stir the market and make 2018 a different year from previous years. So there may be some structural changes, not gradual changes.
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