Attention must be paid to capacity and performance

Jim Lehane gives his overview of the current storage market

The storage market is continuing to evolve, with SSD, mobile apps and cloud continuing to affect business requirements.

Resellers looking for opportunities in this area should recognise that storage is moving into three key divisions when it comes to consumption: enterprise, cloud service provider and web-scale. Each segment has very different pain points.

In addition to the data management functionality demanded by datacentre workloads today, more attention must be paid to capacity and performance.

This means looking not only at the underlying technologies, disk drive and flash, but the workloads themselves. Most of the data stored by workloads is inactive.

It is seldom accessed after being created and needs to be handled in as cost effectively as possible.

The cost of disk drives – thanks to ever-increasing densities – still makes it the preferred storage media for rapid data volume growth. This will remain the case for some time.

On the performance front, the increased adoption of virtualisation has put a lot of pressure on storage to deliver excellent random read/write performance.

Flash excels in this arena. With smart tracking of active I/O for all virtual workloads in real time, it is possible to keep all active data in flash and store less frequently accessed data on disk on the same system.

For the channel, virtualisation still represents the single largest opportunity in the datacentre. IT organisations are looking to do more virtualisation and get a better result from doing so.

Channel partners can help customers virtualise their Tier 1 apps and virtualised desktop infrastructure, along with boosting their agility, productivity and service levels.

Jim Lehane is head of technology at Espion