A Recap of the Top Five Storage Trends of the 2010s

Looking back over the past ten years, it’s astonishing how far along data storage technology has come. Only a decade ago, storage options were limited, inconvenient, and expensive—a far cry from what’s available on the market today. This article takes a quick look at the top five storage trends of the 2010s. It also provides a little history behind these trends—trends that most likely will continue on into the 2020s.

1. Joint Batch Of Disks (JBOD)

Redundant Array of Inexpensive/Independent Disks (RAID) is the most common standard for configuring multiple drives with standard and non-standard configurations. Conversely, JBOD is another option that exists (humorously referred to as a poor man’s storage array). There are several different configurations of this non-RAID drive architecture as well—each one defined by an acronym.

JBOD (which can refer to Joint Batch Of Disks or Just a Bunch of Disks/Drives) might be the most fundamental example of a non-RAID drive architecture; it represents multiple interconnected hard disk drives (HDDs) operated independently as individual devices or collectively to comprise one or more logical volumes. In the case of the latter, a Logical Volume Manager (VLM) or Linux-based utility (such as mdadm) are used. Logical volumes defined as JBOD architectures are typically termed spanned volumes (SPAN) or linear volumes (BIG).

2. Storage Virtualization

IBM pioneered the concept of server virtualization way back in the 1960s. In the 1990s and 2000s, products like VMware Virtual Platform and Windows VirtualPC entered the market. Server-based virtualization relies on shared storage in order for certain features to be realized and is more suited for data centers. However, dedicated storage arrays aren’t necessarily an ideal solution for SMEs or distributed enterprises.

Throughout the mid-2000s and 2010s, data storage vendors finally started offering solutions that addressed challenges facing distributed organizations in equipping their remote sites with highly accessible yet cost-efficient shared storage appliances. Rather than using expensive and complex dedicated storage arrays or shared JBOD arrays which introduce a single point of failure, storage virtualization (also referred to as virtual SANs) is a perfect solution.

Virtual SANs became widely popular since they feature flexible architecture that can be scaled out starting with only a couple of nodes to thousands of nodes all clustered together. This results in the elimination of any single point of failure associated with the storage infrastructure. Compute and storage resources scale up separately as well, guaranteeing these kinds of solutions will meet long-term performance requirements.

3. Object-Based Storage

For some time, data lacked substance, sitting on virtual servers as files or floating around in storage networks as blocks. However, all that changed when Garth Gibson commercialized his concept of Network-Attached Secure Disks (NASD) with the foundation of Panasas. NASD technology introduced the transfer of variable-length objects rather than fixed-size blocks, which diminished overhead on file servers, enabling storage devices to transfer data directly to clients.

Between 1999 and 2013 respectively, approximately $300 million worth of investment was allocated towards object storage development. Of the products to spawn from Gibson’s research (which started in 1995), they include Centera (content-addressable storage) developed by Filepool, Lustre (parallel distributed file system) developed by Peter J. Braam, among others. Such products were an ideal solution for industries like healthcare and social media companies.

4. Solid-State Drives (SSDs)

There will forever be a place for hard disk drives (HDDs) and magnetic tape data storage devices as long as there is a need for cold storage. Nevertheless, conventional spinning HDDs are fast becoming an outmoded technology as solid-state drives (SSDs) drop in price. Other than being affordable, SSDs are exponentially faster than HDDs, take up less space, are less noisy, and use less electricity than HDDs. The only major concern many people have about SSDs is how long they will hold up between failures and will it end up corrupting their data.

5. Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe)

While many people began replacing their HDDs with faster and cheaper SSDs, they found out that traditional interfaces such as SATA 3 aren’t fast enough for even some consumer-level SSDs. Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) has been around for a while but experienced an increase in adoption during the 2010s due to the speeds it supports.

Compared to 600 Mbps tops provided by SATA 3, PCIe technology enables interface speeds of up to 1 Gbps per lane. Considering PCIe can scale up from one to 16 lanes, it puts the 0.6 Gbps per lane offered by SATA 3 to shame. In addition to that, more lanes from SATA require more SATA devices.

Though a number of computer devices produced today still feature various types of expansion slots, PCIe is presently considered the standard internal interface. Furthermore, many of today’s newly designed motherboards are manufactured with only PCIe slots, making the switch to PCIe for everyone inevitable. Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe)—a communication transfer protocol—is now the primary software interface standard. By combining PCIe with NVMe, one manufacturer has since developed an SSD with read/write speeds of 6 to 6.8 Gbps.

RAID.Inc has been an industry leader in developing custom high-performance storage solutions for organizations such as NASA, Intel, Harvard University, the U.S. Department of Justice, only to name a few.

We offer cutting edge solutions that include Pangea Solutions (the industry’s first turnkey Lustre on ZFS appliance), the ARI-409 (7GB/sec on reads and up to 5.5GB/sec on writes), and the 4U 90-Bay Ability EBOD (a high-density disk drive enclosure)—as well as a long list of other high-performance storage systems. To learn more about enterprise data storage trends or to inquire about one of our high-performance storage solutions, talk to an expert today!