Key Criteria for Evaluating Primary Storage Solutionsv3.0

1. Summary

Ideas around primary storage, data, and workloads have changed radically in recent years. This is due in large part to new technologies, architectures, and development models as well as to the realization that data is one of the most important assets for any type of organization. Data is no longer coarsely categorized as structured or unstructured but is instead classified by the applications and business processes accessing it. In fact, thanks to digital transformation and other initiatives, it is now common for applications to access structured and unstructured data concurrently, with different protocols, based on separate logical or physical repositories.

When it comes to modern storage in general and block storage in particular, flash memory and high-speed Ethernet networks have commoditized performance and reduced costs, allowing for greater flexibility in system design. At the same time, enterprise organizations want to align storage with the rest of their infrastructure strategy, based on pressing requirements, including:

• A more agile infrastructure that can respond quickly to business needs
• Improved data mobility and integration with the cloud
• Support for larger numbers of applications and workloads concurrently on the same system
• Overall infrastructure simplification
• Automation and orchestration that speed up and scale operations
• Better infrastructure performance that is reflected in user or customer experience
• Drastic reduction in the total cost of ownership (TCO) along with a significant increase in the capacity under management per systems administrator
• Cloud-like consumption models

Many of these points are crucial to the realization of modern IT infrastructures and strategies and have contributed to the increasing number of storage solutions available from both startups and established vendors. Traditional high-end and mid-range storage arrays have been joined by software-defined and specialized solutions serving similar market segments but are differentiated by their focus on specific requirements. A one-size-fits-all solution doesn’t exist.

Storage solutions have been affected also by the steady increase of public cloud adoption. Paradoxically, while it might appear that the data center would grow in response to the huge demand for compute and storage resources, organizations seem to trust public cloud providers’ abilities to deliver enterprise-grade services, resulting in more workloads being shifted to the cloud. This broader adoption of cloud services makes customers more inclined to adopt cloud-like, operating expenditure (OpEx)-based consumption models. So vendors have started providing storage as a service (STaaS) as a critical way to differentiate from their competitors, offering customers more flexible consumption options.

Just like the entire technology industry, the primary storage sector is impacted by a volatile global situation amid multiple crises. In addition to preexisting tight supply chain issues caused by the pandemic, global geopolitical tensions are currently impacting the availability of materials and forcing governments to reevaluate the strategic nature of their technology industry. Moreover, in some regions of the world, the steep increase in energy costs and the impact of climate change are driving organizations to reevaluate the efficiency of their primary storage solutions from an energy consumption and carbon footprint perspective, either through voluntary environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) policies or because of external regulations. Vendors are sensitive to this policy and regulatory shift, which might soon become a new competitive differentiator.

In this report, we analyze the important features of modern storage systems to see how well they respond to enterprise needs and enable organizations to evaluate specific solutions based on their own requirements.