5 Ways Storage Is Evolving

An IT industry analyst article published by Virtualization Review.

Be sure to take advantage of these storage industry trends.

• By Mike Matchett

With its acquisition of Virsto, VMware certainly understands storage as usual doesn’t cut it when it comes to dense, high-powered virtual environments. This technology addresses the so-called “I/O blender” effect that comes from mixing the I/O from many VMs into one stream on its way to external shared storage. It does this by journaling what looks like highly random I/O to flash. Then asynchronously sorts it out to a hard disk. This is more optimization, though, than game-changing storage strategy.

Here are five broad trends in the storage industry that you can take advantage of today.

• TAKE 1 Flash
  Flash has certainly changed the storage game. There are many ways it’s applied — at the server (such as PCIe cards from Fusion-IO, EMC XtremIO), in the network (such as Astute), or in the array (such as pure flash and hybrid storage from just about everybody). To make the most of your flash investment, keep an eye on factors like where high performance will have the best impact on the applications for which it’s best suited.
• TAKE 2 Hyperconvergence
  We’ve all seen pre-packaged “converged” racks of servers, storage, networking, and hypervisor platforms from vendors such as VCE, Dell, and HP. These can be great deals if you want a single source and low risk when building a virtual environment. However, the storage isn’t necessarily different than what you’d get if you built it yourself. In some ways, running a virtual storage appliance is a type of convergence that architecturally shifts the burden of hosting storage directly onto your hypervisors. Taking things a step further are hyperconvergence vendors like Simplivity, Nutanix and Scale Computing. These collapse compute, storage and hypervisor into modular building blocks that make scaling out a datacenter as easy as stacking Legos. Purpose-built storage services are tightly integrated and support optimized and highly cost-efficient VM operations.
• TAKE 3 VM Centricity

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…(read the complete as-published article there)