5 technologies to watch in 2015
2014 brought us a lot of interesting hardware technologies, including the continued growth of SSDs, the launch of 12GB SAS, and a big platform refresh from Intel® with the new Xeon® Processor E5-2600 v3 product family.
So, now that the New Year’s confetti has been swept up and the hangover has faded into memory, it’s time to get back to business. What will be the most notable technologies to emerge in 2015?
While 2014 brought us several important hardware updates, this year we expect to see big new trends in both hardware and software. Below are five emerging technologies that all of us at Pogo are particularly excited about for 2015.
“Software-Defined Everything” is Mainstream
Pogo has always been a big proponent of Software Defined Storage, and in 2015 this is more important than ever. The pairing of commodity hardware with a new breed of software stacks will continue gaining the legitimacy it deserves.
“Software-Defined” is moving well beyond individual systems and into clustered storage, hyperscale, and hyper converged applications.
New Storage Technologies like Ceph and Swiftstack
Talk about a new breed, Ceph is right there at the top of our list of storage software technologies to watch. Being a fully clustered solution which can quickly scale, Ceph is taking the hyper-scale market by storm. In addition to block and object storage, Ceph will soon support production level file access, making it a serious contender for any large scale storage project.
Large Cap Spinning Disks
As Mark Twain said, “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” So it is with the large capacity spinning disk. The economics still don’t work for an all flash world, especially with the technologies currently coming to market in magnetic medium. 8TB and 10TB drives will be common place in 2015. The only caveat to this storage expansion is with these increased sizes also come slower access, as technologies such as Shingled Magnetic Recording must be used to obtain these extreme aerial densities. This leads back to more work on the software side with tiering and caching, but the needs in these areas are being quickly met.
SSDs and the Death of 15k
While the high-capacity spinning disk is here to stay, we predict the imminent demise of 15k small-cap drives. 15k still has a better price per GB than SSDs, but it’s not much of an advantage any more. There is just no place in the market for a ‘tweener’ disk between slow high-cap and fast SSD. Manufacturers will still produce 15k for quite some time to handle the needs of legacy customers. However, by the end of 2015 these drives will have limited usefulness in new deployments.
NVMe
NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory express) is a recent specification that enables SSDs to connect directly to the PCI bus. This reduces stack overhead and provides up to a 50% reduction in latency vs typical SATA/SAS based SSDs. With NVMe based SSDs finally arriving in 2015 to match the growing market of chassis and other components, we see this technology rapidly becoming a go-to choice for ultra low latency applications.
2015 is shaping up to be another exciting year for new technologies and developments in the IT world. As always, we’re here on the forefront, helping guide our customers through the jungle of evolving technologies. We love partnering with our clients to architect the perfect recipe of hardware and software for their unique environments. If you have any questions, give us a call or drop us a line. We always love discussing new tech!
If you have any questions about how Pogo can help you solve the issues your organization is facing, please call us at 888-828-POGO, or email .