Naturally, one of the biggest trends in storage is the continuing explosion of big data and the need to cope with the ever-growing amount of data. Although structured data is still growing, it's unstructured data that is growing by leaps and bounds, and IT is stuck dealing with the problem. Although data is still growing, at least the growth is not accelerating, and IT professionals may get a bit of a breather.
The rate of growth is not increasing, and depending on how the data is examined, there may have been a slight decrease in growth, Marko says. It's too early to tell if that will be a trend going forward, though. Of the respondents to the survey, 76% reported data growth of 24% or less annually, with most of the data growth being in the 10 to 24% range. Although it's still tremendous growth in the amount of data, hard drive and SSD technology is growing faster, so it's created a more manageable storage environment. Enterprises aren't stuck patching the problem by throwing hardware at it, and now can plan more strategically.
Of particular interest to enterprises is the trend towards scale-out architectures, Marko says. Historically NAS-based products are finding competition with a new generation of products supporting iSCSI, block storage on distributed file systems and cloud stacks such as OpenStack that are essentially distributed file systems working in scale-out designs.
Although DAS continues to be the most widely-deployed type of storage connectivity, with 92% of respondents to a recent InformationWeek survey of 313 IT professionals having some sort of DAS deployed, Fibre Channel is the most pervasive technology, with 38% of respondents stating that more than half of their storage capacity is on Fibre Channel. Additionally, Fibre Channel over Ethernet has been deployed at 38% of respondents' companies, a growth of 10 points over last year's survey.
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