Automated storage tiering (AST) appears to be picking up steam in the enterprise. Companies are building cloud storage systems with affordable, industry-standard hardware like SATA disks, and AST gives them the flexibility they need to move data between platters and speedy solid-state drives.
Software-defined services and flash storage are changing data centers. Infostor contributing editor Pedro Hernandez explained that virtualized and cloud-based services have opened up new avenues for software distribution, and companies have responded by overhauling their infrastructures for greater flexibility and virtualization. More specifically, software-defined storage has lessened the need for expensive proprietary hardware and enabled more rapid provisioning, making the combination of SATA and SSD disks commonplace in the data center.
Citing a survey of storage professionals conducted by TheInfoPro, Hernandez pinpointed AST as one of the most sought-after enterprise technologies of 2013. Tiering will be critical as enterprise storage capacity continues to double every year and organizations procure additional media and appliances to accommodate the demand. In an article for Computing, John Leonard observed that the trend toward virtualization is a way to maximize storage resources while saving on power and infrastructure.
"Fifteen years ago we had half a dozen large physical servers. Now we have got 80 virtualized servers," one gaming industry CIO told Computing. "The amount of computing power and the amount of data storage are enormously larger, but the amount of actual electricity we're consuming is the same and the amount of cooling that we are needing to use is the same."
Leonard explained that with data volumes rising 30 percent per year, storage virtualization has become a front-and-center concern for IT managers. Fifty-six percent of respondents to a Computing survey cited virtualized storage as the data center technology that they expected to be adopted more than any other over the next three years. It was closely followed by desktop virtualization and SSD storage.
