SAN Storage Innovations: What’s on the Horizon?

Storage Area Networks (SANs) have been around for decades, and they have undergone a plethora of changes in recent years. Every year, the storage industry invests heavily in research and development, leading to significant discoveries in SAN storage technology. As such, it is critical to stay updated on the latest trends, developments, and innovations on the horizon. This blog post will detail some of the most significant innovations in SAN storage and give you an idea of what to expect over the coming years.

 

NVMe Over Fabric:

NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) is a protocol designed for flash storage. It is specifically engineered for solid-state drives (SSDs) and includes parallelisation methodologies to read and write data more quickly. NVMe over Fabric (NVMe-oF) takes this a step further and is an emerging technology that combines NVMe and fabrics like InfiniBand, RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCEv2) for connectivity and networking. NVMe-oF is designed to offer lightning-fast connectivity speeds with sub-microsecond latencies to networked storage.

 

High-Speed Ethernet:

The Fibre Channel protocol has been the standard SAN connectivity protocol for decades. However, it has a relatively short range, limited scalability, and is expensive to deploy. Now, with the development of high-speed ethernet, data centres can combine storage networking and regular networking into one infrastructure. As such, iSCSI and NFS over Ethernet have become increasingly popular as they offer higher scalability and lower deployment and operational costs than Fibre Channel.

 

Object Storage:

Object storage is gaining popularity because of its unmatched scalability and simplified management. Object storage defines the objects, which refer to data and metadata in the same bucket or container. Out of all other SAN-based storage, object storage is the only one that does not provide file-level access. Instead, access is provided through APIs and object storage gateways. As such, object storage is designed for massive-scale data storage and analysis.

 

AI Control:

With the vast amounts of data that SANs store, managing storage resources can be quite complex and difficult. One development for overcoming this difficulty is AI control. AI control offers data centres the ability to allocate and control storage resources in real-time, ultimately optimizing them for better performance and higher efficiency. It does this by analyzing critical data patterns and applying the results to make intelligent decisions on when and where data should be moved, copied, or deleted.

 

Distributed Compute:

Distributed compute is a new SAN technology that uses remote servers to process data-intensive workloads. By processing data on remote servers, data centres can significantly reduce workload and data transfer bottlenecks. It also enables businesses to analyze data in near real-time from remote locations, substantially improving data centre and cloud analytics.

 

Conclusion

In conclusion, these new SAN solution innovations - NVMe over Fabric, High-Speed Ethernet, Object Storage, AI Control, and Distributed Compute - are advancing the storage industry, helping it scale and simplify data management. These innovations allow organizations to operate in real-time, providing them with more insights and opportunities than ever before. As such, by staying updated on the latest SAN storage trends and innovations, data centres can improve their competitiveness, allowing organizations to focus on growing their businesses and achieving new heights.