Active Archive Alliance’s 2015 Predictions For Data Storage And Archiving

Continuing on with forward-looking predictions, the members of Active Archive Alliance (in this case members from Crossroads Systems, DataDirect networks, Fujifilm, and Qstar) shared their predictions on the upcoming trends for the year of 2015.

Continuing on with forward-looking predictions, the members of Active Archive Alliance (in this case members from Crossroads Systems, DataDirect networks, Fujifilm, and Qstar) shared their predictions on the upcoming trends for the year of 2015.

With interesting innovations in tape storage (and certain problems), more and more data will be sent to tape in 2015. The new innovations include Linear Tape File Systems (LTFS), using Barium Ferrite as a medium in place of Metal particles, tape NAS, flash + tape (Flape), tape in the cloud, high capacity formats (such as Sony's new 185TB cartridge), and newly extended roadmaps. With the mentioned innovations, tape will really appeal to customers that have expanded data storage needs and a limited budget.

The large adoption of the public cloud, and the anticipated adoption of private clouds, organizations will be increasing their adoption in tiered storage. Flash is all the rage these days and it will only continue to grow. Flash is costly, even with the introduction of lower cost flash most companies will use this as the Tier0 and use a multi-tiered storage platform such as the Silicon Mechanics zStax StorCore 104 or a hybrid array such as the EMC VNXe3200. More and more organizations will switch over to multi-tier storage and take advantage of software such as Dot Hill's RealStor that has built in automatic real-time tiering.

Organizations will also be choosing more storage applications and software that intelligently communicate with current storage needs and archived information, an example would be the before mentioned RealStor. Improved management and decreased complexity will allow organizations to utilize their storage more efficiently and help them save time and money.

And finally more organizations will move to object storage as an archive. Object storage is highly scalable, cost effective, and is able to act as a cloud infrastructure for collaboration. Object based archives can be accessed through many ways including NFS, CIFS, and Mobile Oss.

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