2024 Data Storage and Active Archive Trends – Part II
Members of the Active Archive Alliance shared their 2024 predictions for data storage and active archives. In Part II, we look at artificial intelligence, cloud repatriation, tape active archives, data management and high availability.
AI to Boost Active Archive Storage
In 2024, AI will accelerate demand for active archive storage. The initial push for storage in the nascent AI world was primarily driven by the development of algorithms and machine learning. These activities consumed a lot of data – some of that data existed, and some of that, as in the case for autonomous driving, needed to be generated. Regardless of whether it was new or old, the data was primarily used for training. Generative AI has now reached a point of public accessibility to enable the world at large to use AI to actively generate new content, generate it in larger quantities and faster than ever previously imagined. This generated content output will become the new input for many processes and commercial endeavors. This data will have more value than ever before and will therefore need to be stored for a long time and be actively accessed during its life. – Mark Pastor, Director, Platform Product Management, Western Digital.
Cloud Data Repatriation Will Become a Key Topic Due to Economic and Technical Reasons
More and more companies will realize that there are many disadvantages to storing their data with a cloud provider. In addition to high costs for transaction fees, storage fees and egress fees, there are also technical and strategic reasons to reconsider data storage with a cloud provider. There will be a strong trend towards “cloud repatriation”, i.e. the return of cloud data to on-prem storage systems in the local data center. In this context, Active Archives are ideally suited for cloud data repatriation. Active Archive solutions offer S3 compatibility and, like cloud providers, can also support multiple storage classes based on flash/disk and tape. – Thomas Thalmann, CEO, PoINT Software & Systems.
Tape Active Archive Scales to Exabytes
High Performance Computing, Hyperscalers and Video Surveillance markets are forcing Active Archive vendors to consider how they can help these industries scale into the exabyte world. Hardware vendors offer massively scalable tape libraries with hundreds of tape drives and tens of thousands of media slots. Software vendors must provide single file (SMB or NFS) or cloud (S3) interfaces that offer fast performance, using multiple tape drives in parallel, and high availability with fault tolerance built in throughout. New multi-node architectures will be hitting the market in 2024 and will allow any tape media to be loaded for reads or writes in any tape drive inside the library, without library partitioning, and accessed through one of many nodes that accepts the task by communicating with all other nodes in the cluster. – David Thomson, SVP Sales and Marketing, QStar Technologies Inc.
Data Management Reaches Maturity in 2024
The global economics will aid recovery of the data hardware storage industry by late 2024. More noticeable change will be seen in the planning of how data is managed. Data management is paramount to business success, both in terms of financial responsibility and economic value of data. Business leaders are under pressure to deliver on planet, people, and profit. The value of data plays an important role in the 3-Ps. How data is managed determines the impact of retaining the data has on the planet. Data exists at the creation of people, and data is used to enhance the lives of those people, and data is important in the preservation of humanity’s digital history. Active archive requirements will not shrink, businesses must align data management to monetize outcomes while being fiscally responsible. This is a new focus that will be predominate at all levels of digital data storage management. – Kiyoshi Urabe, Business Line Executive, IBM DRI Tape Solutions.
High Availability (HA) Requirements Will Skyrocket in 2024
IT teams and business leaders alike have no tolerance for downtime. More first-rate features will continue to be introduced constantly, and the need for 100% uptime will become just short of critical, ensuring processes like active archive can continue to run despite temporary network, hardware or other service failures as more systems and devices increasingly compete for bandwidth. One example use case that will demand HA is video surveillance storage for retail stores and in public transportation vehicles, as the data captured in these areas is important for facial recognition to help solve crimes. IT video surveillance solutions will continue to improve HA and storage capacity to match increasing market demands. – Bruce Kornfeld, Chief Marketing and Product Officer, StorMagic.
