Pure Storage shares 2020 predictions for enterprise storage

Oostveen, backlit by a slide summarising Pure
Storage's decade of achievements.

Pure Storage celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, and can boast of introducing enterprise storage that is 10x faster, requires 10x less power, is 10x smaller and 10x less complex.

"The market looks to us for our perspective, our view and our opinion on what is going to happen," said Matthew Oostveen, CTO, Asia Pacific & Japan for Pure Storage. 

He noted that storage is "mind-bogglingly complex" and said that a revolution for storage has been a long time coming as opposed to evolutions that have already occurred in networking and compute spaces.

According to Oostveen, Pure Storage has introduced over the course of 10 years innovations such as:

• Non-disruptive upgrades
• Always-on quality of service (QoS)
• Artificial intelligence (AI)-driven ops
• Cloud data protection
• Always-on encryption
• Cloud management

The company is now all about the Modern Data Experience, which delivers simple, seamless and sustainable (and secure) storage, Oostveen said. He also shared six 2020 predictions for enterprise storage:

As-a-service business models

According to Pure Storage, users are looking to manage on-premise infrastructure like they manage the cloud, while getting the same enterprise capabilities and control in the cloud that they have with on-premise infrastructure - in a flexible, subscription-based as-a-service model.

In 2020, the demand for as-a-service in storage will increase, but successful models need to balance both the operations and purchasing aspects. From an operations perspective, the ideal is to have standardisation, on-demand access, API-driven management, and limitless scale. On the consumption side, the wishlist includes a pay-per-use model, bursting capabilities - the ability to flex up or down as needed - and an Evergreen experience, with uninterrupted service levels over time.

"Across Asia, we are seeing this happening first in Australia," Oostveen said.

Object storage

While not new, object storage has shaken off its roots as cheap-and-deep cold storage. Object storage supports highly-parallel and distributed access to large data sets. It has started to emerge as the storage standard for cloud-native applications, said Pure Storage.

As applications are developed or replatformed for cloud-friendly architectures, object storage will become the natural choice for enabling applications to decouple and disaggregate applications and their compute resources from a pool of shared storage, Pure Storage predicts, pointing out that the trend can be seen with large software vendors such as Splunk and Vertica.

Oostveen noted that the Australia-New Zealand (ANZ) region has been the first to take this up but added that there is "strong uptake" in both Singapore and China.

Modern analytics 

Fuelling the growth for modern analytics is more affordable infrastructure options such as more powerful CPUs, consumption-based infrastructure, available both on-premises and in the public cloud, and cheaper flash memory, Pure Storage notes.

There is also a significant growth in stream (real-time) analytics platforms, both open source (Apache Flink, Apache Beam and Spark Streaming) and commercial (Splunk DSP) replacing more and more batch-based processing platforms. Modern analytics can now reach larger scale with cloud-native analytics architectures comprised of stateless servers and container and high-performance S3 object stores, Pure Storage stated.

Additionally, the unbridled growth of data sources including smart devices (smart home, wearables, connected cars, the industrial Internet, etc.) will drive the adoption of modern analytics as demand for more insights grows.

Flash

Flash is largely earmarked for tier-1, performance-centric applications, but with new solid state technologies coming online and stratifying the memory space, flash is really poised to break out and address whole new swathes of data, Pure Storage said.

On the high end, the combination of storage class memory (SCM) and high-speed protocols like NVMe over fabric enable shared storage arrays to provide server-based storage-like performance to the most latency-sensitive applications. This set of applications is one of the last holdouts sitting on direct-attached storage (DAS), Pure Storage explained, so it can finally enjoy all the data services common to shared storage such as data protection and data reduction. "It’s now possible to get the top-end performance and rich data services," the company stated.

At the same time, the impending introduction of quad level cell (QLC) is bringing flash to tiers of storage that have largely stayed on magnetic disks to date. QLC stores 4 bits of memory per memory cell, making flash cheaper (though slower). This cost reduction enables all applications to take advantage of the benefits of flash beyond performance: simplicity, reliability, and reduced data centre power and space.

"2020 will mark the end of hard drives," Oostveen predicted. "We are going to see new technologies made mainstream which will be an Exocet missile to traditional storage.

The rise of containers and persistent storage 

Containers were born to make deploying stateless applications as simple and low-overhead as possible. But as the emergence of Kubernetes and the endorsement of containers by VMware is rapidly expanding container usage towards mainstream applications, delivering persistent storage for containers is critical to enable databases and applications to replatform for containers.

2020 looks to be the year that most enterprises evolve their private and hybrid cloud platforms beyond virtual machines (VMs), deploying an enterprise-wide container strategy, including building the storage foundation that enables stateful, mission-critical applications to embrace containers.

The largest customers in the Asia Pacific region using containers are in Australia, Oostveen disclosed. "We are seeing a switch from less than 5% of applications in containers to (a number) that will double, triple, quadruple in the next 12 months," he said.

Artificial intelligence (AI)

Organisations will be more open to AI making decisions for them. Customers want to set policies and let the vendors implement the policies, which is partially driven by the declarative nature of Kubernetes and container management. The simplicity of containers will enable organisations to define a state, and the container will be the catalyst. The technology should then drive and deliver insights within the whole environment.

Pure Storage's forecast is that AI will be applied to efficiently finding where a predictive model performs poorly and fixing the problem by "augmenting data for that feature space". "This is critical for AI applications like anomaly detection and automatic root cause analysis to scale and be applicable in more contexts," Pure Storage explained.