With the flash storage market exceeding earlier projections to pass $11 billion in sales in 2014, and continuing its upward trajectory, Pure Storage sees the storage industry 'firing on all cylinders', with all flash a key growth driver. This trend is making waves in South Africa too, says Rupert Brazier, country manager SA at Pure Storage.
"All flash storage has proven significantly faster, denser, more power efficient and reliable. On top of that, it's more cost-effective. Deployments are being stepped up to drive the digital business and support innovation," says Brazier.
He predicts strong growth, thanks to key trends coming to the fore in 2016: "In terms of changes in the storage landscape, I see IOT being realised, partly due to massive global adoption of smartphones - the World Bank expects 8 billion to be in use by 2020. In addition, the automotive and wearables market will be the next major growth segments for data generation, and there is huge, untapped potential value in this data. This will drive a whole new generation of technology in the same way that the likes of Apache, Google and Facebook redefined the way that Internet and application technology worked," he says.
Following global trends, Brazier expects to see South African businesses going digital and changing their approach to storage this year. "The South African market is a keen adopter of new and innovative technologies. Large enterprises are not afraid to make changes to improve their abilities and service to their customers. There is an acceleration of flash adoption and acceptance from decision-makers in the region that will ultimately let flash technology go mainstream in the enterprise," he says.
"Today's storage arrays are a five-year investment, including commissioning, use and migration at the end of life. Moore's Law is driving exponential increases in workloads so the storage being deployed today needs to be able to sustain workloads from servers and applications in 2020. Existing disk-based technology will not be able to meet that future requirement for capacity, power consumption or performance; flash is the only existing technology that can do this."
Pure Storage notes that coupled with the move to the digital business, there is a growing swing to the disruptive 'Evergreen Storage' model. Brazier explains: "Our customers deploy storage once and independently upgrade performance, capacity and connectivity, with no downtime, while keeping maintenance costs flat for the lifespan of the array.
With Evergreen Storage, enterprises will no longer need to carry out regular "Forklift Upgrades" every three years, which are expensive, risky and wasteful. Perhaps the biggest driver is cost savings - if medium to large organisations can leverage the benefit of enhanced performance, simplicity, non-disruptive upgrades and an extended life cycle (Evergreen Storage) at a reduced TCO, it becomes a very attractive proposition," he says.
"The era of flash storage has definitely arrived," he concludes.
Share