The need of enterprise storage is never ending. Since we are now in the era of digital business where IT become the primary foundation to generate its business, follow by the explosion of IOT devices, there are huge demand of storing data more than ever in the history.
In common enterprise organization If you starting on 50 Terabytes of data and became 100 terabytes in short time (1-2 years) that’s a big growth from end-user point of view, but from the IT strategy perspective its probably utilize the same architecture of Enterprise Storage since almost all legacy enterprise storage can easily scale up capacity 2 or 3 times eventually.
But how if you go from 100 Terabytes to 1 petabyte (ten times growth) within a short time lets assume within 1 or 2 year? This unpredictable growth potentially pushes IT architecture to change immediately as fast as business speed.
To anticipate this kind of growth some enterprise storage vendor announced the “scale-out” architecture instead of legacy “scale-up” architecture. With the scale out, the capacity upgrade is followed by the performance incremental together at the same time. There will be new disks and new controller in a bundle component when added. This architecture is a breakthrough regarding the capacity limitation in the old days.
Now we talk about the disk inside the enterprise storage. Some of you may know there is a SSD flash with AHCI is showed up in 2016 as the key component in enterprise storage technology to produce an “All flash Array”, yes those solution is based on SSD is very fast. but right now there is “new comer SSD” based on NVMe technology already appears in the market which is practically tested that new SSD(NVMe) is 5x faster than the SSD(AHCI), while SSD(AHCI) it self is 20x faster than HDD 15K rpm.
Based on it, Today’s Enterprise storage based on HDD is the slowest to perform in modern application because Legacy Enterprise Storage systems was designed for traditional applications in old days and it may not be fit anymore for new data-intensive workloads such as intelligent edge computing (IOT devices) and big data analytics. These new workloads are driving the need for new technologies and new architecture to perform.
