The impact of the three IT trends on the storage industry hundreds of millions of market will be easy who hands

In the past 20 years, only three significant trends have affected the IT industry: Moore's Law, the Internet and mobile. All the rest of the trends and changes come from those three.

Apple saw the prospect of mobile technology before launching the iphone and launched a PDA called Newton. It was a very cool technique at the time, but it was a complete failure product. This is because Newton's PDA lacks three things: computational power driven by Moore's law, universal Internet access, and well-developed mobile ecosystems. After 15, Apple launched the IPhone in 2007, its processing and digital storage capabilities are hundreds of thousands of Newton, can be connected to the Internet in real time, so became one of the most successful products.

2015 will be the year of the digital storage industry awakening, and the industry will recognise the trends that have been going on over the years, radically altering the value of 100 billion of billions of dollars in digital storage. While these trends are obvious, none of the analysts have described them clearly, as the resulting changes are too big for the old-world players.

First, many small and medium sized enterprises (SMB) will take advantage of SaaS services, such as Office365, Salesforce, and box, so they do not have to purchase digital storage implementations. As a result, about 20 billion dollars of market will disappear from the traditional digital storage industry. You might say that these SaaS services require the purchase of digital storage devices. In fact, they do need to buy digital storage devices, but they are typically purchased directly from disk drives (HDD) and component manufacturers. So this market has lost the status of traditional digital storage equipment vendors.

Second, they will continue to maintain their digital storage facilities for large enterprises, Governments and some areas in need of data. Currently, there are about 20,000 such entities worldwide. Individuals of this size are cheaper to maintain their digital storage infrastructure and have more control over themselves. Now, however, their approach is in some way different from the last 20 years. For time-sensitive applications, such as relational databases or Virtual Desktop infrastructure (VDI), it doesn't make sense to continue deploying a bunch of 15000 RPM, Access time 7ms disks. The deployment of solid-state hard disks (SSD) can increase the speed by thousands of times times. On the other hand, if workloads are insensitive to time, there is no need to continue deploying traditional digital storage area networks (Sans) or network attached digital storage (NAS) technologies. Using a scale-out, software-based approach can save half the cost and be more reliable.

These large entities will continue to deploy digital storage facilities on a large scale, but use more digital storage than Google, Amazon or Facebook. For latency-sensitive workloads, they take a full flash array, mixed digital storage, or a fused digital storage format. For all other workloads, from Tier 1 to long-term archiving, this will be the form of software deployment on a standard server.

In 10 years, traditional SAN and NAS will fade away. Like large computers, they will not disappear altogether, but they will no longer be the definition of the industry. Such trends have been shown in the financial performance of leading companies such as Emc,netapp and HP.

3rd, a group of start-up companies will succeed. Since 2010, more than 6.7 billion dollars have been invested in digital storage and large data start-ups, and the amount of investment has grown by 75% over the past 5 years.

As a result, the predicted vicious competition did not happen, and the real consequence is that many startups are thriving. In the field of latency-sensitive digital storage, Atlantis Computing, nimble, Nutanix, Pernix Data, Pure Storage and Solidfire have all been successful. Cleversafeisilon (part of EMC) and scality lead the pack in horizontally scaled file-level and object-based digital storage.

So many friends ask whether we are facing a new bubble. I didn't have a thorough understanding of startups, and I did see some crazy valuations. But in terms of digital storage, I expect the industry to realize that there is no bubble in the digital storage industry in 2015. Ahead of us is a radical industrial transformation that will change hands hundreds of millions of of dollars.

(via VB, translation | Fast carp)

(Responsible editor: Mengyishan)