Solutions Review’s Expert Insights Series is a collection of contributed articles written by industry experts in enterprise software categories. In this feature, ScaleFlux VP of Product Management JB Baker offers his most noteworthy enterprise storage trends to be aware of this year.
Computational storage will become mainstream
As we are constantly reminded, Enterprises are generating lots of data and there are no signs of it slowing down. Finally, people are waking up to the reality that “scale-out” is not sustainable; data center space is at a premium, and every added node means more costs and architecture challenges, not to mention the pressures added by the current economy. Enterprises race to get more functionality from their servers (including better endurance and performance, higher capacity, and cost savings) and are looking for alternatives but are reluctant to add complexity, the critical factor that has blocked computational storage from going mainstream until now.
Finally, NVMe-compatible SSDs with computational storage technology on-board are available, offering a realistic alternative to commodity storage that alleviates many of these issues by offloading the server’s central processing unit (CPU) from unnecessary storage processing, like compression and encryption. These next-gen drives are easy for anybody to get more functionality from their servers, including better endurance and performance, higher capacity, and cost savings. As a result, we expect to see the adoption of plug-and-play computational storage grow significantly in 2023, as now there is a real choice between commodity solid-state drives (SSDs) and SSDs with computational storage technology packaged as native NVMe-compatible drives. […]
