DCIG, a world-renowned IT product and technology analysis organization, recently gave seven major trends in the All-Flash Array (AFA, All-Flash Array) market. DCIG analysts believe that these seven important market trends will affect enterprise users in 2019. purchasing decision. The North American market is the market with the most products, the largest scale, and the highest user acceptance in the global all-flash array market. DCIG's analysis of the North American market can also provide insight into the future development trend of the global market. Here are seven trends in the DCIG all-flash array market:
Trend 1: All-flash array players enter a period of consolidation
DCIG believes that although there are new companies entering the current all-flash array market, the bigger trend is integration.
This point of view is well understood. At present, almost all well-known manufacturers entering the field of all-flash storage are both R&D and acquisition strategies. For example, DELL EMC has a number of all-flash array product lines including VMAX, Unity, XtremIO, DSSD, SC, etc.; The flash array product portfolio will enter a new integration period, completing the integration and optimization of R&D, products, and marketing. Taking HPE as an example, the acquired Nimble all-flash array products are designated as "secondary flash", but HPE also announced that it will implement and configure Nimble's InfoSight intelligent predictive analysis products from the 3PAR StoreServer, and will run through The trend of product integration of HPE's entire data center products is very obvious.
In addition, this kind of integration is not limited to all-flash array product lines. These manufacturers usually also have hyper-converged product lines. Naturally, DELL EMC and HPE needless to say. For example, NetApp has launched the SolidFire-based hyper-converged product NetApp HCI. PureStorage also launched hyperconverged related products. All-flash arrays and hyper-converged systems can be targeted for applications such as VDI/Test/Dev, which will undoubtedly accelerate manufacturers to drive further market consolidation.
Trend 2: Flash capacity is rapidly increasing
DCIG conducted statistics on all-flash array products in the current market and found that the average raw capacity of more than 100 all-flash array products reached 4.4PB, a five-fold increase compared to last year's statistics. The highest capacity of all-flash array products on the market has reached 70PB, which is 7 times that of last year.
The rapid increase in the capacity of all-flash arrays is due to the rapid increase in the amount of user data in recent years, and the increase in the use of some artificial intelligence, deep learning, machine learning and other applications has promoted users' demand for large-capacity flash memory.
Trend 3: Storage Density Increases Significantly
According to the statistics of DCIG, the storage density of all-flash array products has also increased significantly. The storage density of half of the products has exceeded 50TB/RU (Rack Unit, rack unit), and even some products have reached an amazing storage density. 200TB/RU.
The move towards high density of all-flash arrays will undoubtedly accelerate the pace of replacing traditional disk storage arrays. In the past, people thought that traditional disk array systems still had certain advantages in capacity, but when the storage density of all-flash arrays was significantly improved, the advantages of all-flash arrays in terms of space, performance and energy consumption became even more prominent. Users who reduce data center costs are even more attractive.
Trend 4: Use the latest components for extreme performance
Performance remains the biggest advantage of all-flash array products. To this end, another major trend in the market is the use of new and various components to improve product performance. DCIG believes this trend will be better matched by the increased capacity and density of all-flash, including:
Intel's new generation of multi-core CPUs;
32GB FC, 25/40/100GB Ethernet, 56/100GB InfiniBand network;
GPU；
ASICS, for offloading storage tasks;
NVMe；
These components involve processors, storage networks, GPUs, etc. The performance improvement of each link is conducive to the improvement of the performance of the entire all-flash array product. The active use of new components by manufacturers will further improve the performance of all-flash products. performance advantage.
Trend 5: Unified storage will become the standard for all-flash
Compared with the first generation of all-flash arrays, which were almost all block storage SAN arrays, more than half of all-flash arrays now support unified storage.
This trend is also very consistent with the actual needs of data centers. Multi-protocol, multi-system, multi-application type, and multi-environment are common situations for most data center users. All-flash arrays support multiple protocols and accelerate multiple types of work. The load will benefit its popularity in the data center environment.
Trend 6: The docking and interworking of all-flash arrays and public clouds
Based on various considerations such as security, controllability, and economy, the hybrid cloud should be used by users for a long time. The connection and intercommunication between the all-flash array and the public cloud is beneficial to the user's use of the hybrid cloud. In fact, as early as 2014, EMC VMAX high-end storage products began to focus on the docking with mainstream public cloud products. Others like NetApp and IBM attach great importance to the docking of public clouds. Now, all-flash arrays are also in this trend. Most all-flash array products use public cloud storage as the target of cold data or snapshots, so as to improve the data protection mechanism of all-flash arrays and optimize user usage costs.
Trend 7: More intelligent management
DCIG believes some storage predictive analytics capabilities will be more realistic. In fact, predictive storage analysis based on machine learning can improve availability, reliability, and application performance, and is also the beginning of AI's application in storage software. More and more manufacturers have begun to provide users with these more intelligent management functions. The most famous is Nimble's InfoSight forecasting function. In addition, PureStorage's Pure1 META is also a typical example of machine learning-driven storage management. This intelligent storage analytics is definitely useful for those looking to consolidate multiple workloads onto a single all-flash array. It is believed that more manufacturers will introduce more intelligent storage management functions in the future.
Dashuwang Observation
The development of the all-flash array market will develop in the general direction of extreme performance, high capacity, high density, high compatibility and intelligence. In the first quarter of 2018, AFA accounted for 26% of the global storage market, and the North American market is expected to account for a higher proportion. It is believed that in another year or two, with the increase in the production capacity of flash memory chips and the improvement of flash software functions, it will not be very far for all active workloads to run on all-flash arrays in the future.
Compared with the global market, the proportion of AFA in China is only 6.9%. Although the growth is rapid, the base is still too small, but it also means that the future market space is huge. Compared with many all-flash array manufacturers in North America, China has only a few manufacturers such as Huawei and Hongshan, which also reflects the gap in China's storage from the side. However, compared with all-flash products, a large number of hyper-converged system manufacturers have emerged in China in recent years, such as Lenovo, SmartX, XSKY, Sangfor, Scholar Cloud, Huayun Internet, Cloud Totem, etc. Under the general trend of integration, these hyper-converged manufacturers in China shoulder the responsibility of innovation in the field of enterprise storage to a certain extent, and they also expect these companies to launch more competitive products.