The growth of data, as a result of more points of capture and larger data files, such as high-definition medical images and video files, is a consequence of the global transition to digital economies. These are contributing to changes in storage technologies, says technology multinational IBM Storage & Software-Defined Infrastructure distinguished engineer and chief technology strategist Clod Barrera.

Modern storage systems must be responsive to business requirements and workload demands, and must allow for the management of data flows to support business functions effectively. The value businesses derive from analytics processes also makes effective storage a foundational building block for digital commerce.

“The need to meet the fast-paced, data-driven demands of the digital world is leading to a time of rapid innovation in storage. Integrated infrastructure helps to manage the large volumes of data and eases the automation of processes. Software-defined storage and virtualisation – placing the technology in the software – allow for standards-based hardware to be used as an integrated infrastructure platform,” he says.

Storage systems must be flexible in accommodating the effective and efficient movement of digital records. Further, they must be able to link data to various analytics systems before data is retained in low-cost storage.

The high performance, responsiveness and availability of modern storage systems rely on virtualisation and flash storage. Flash storage provides fast access to stored data and high availability of the data for analytics systems and work processes. In turn, this improves the ability to move data between various processes, systems and storage formats as the data matures.

“Despite improved density of storage formats, 20% for spinning disks and 30% for flash, there is an overall growth in the storage requirements of most businesses, so storage will continue to be perceived as expensive, despite such technical improvements,” explains Barrera.

Additionally, changes to workloads and applications in businesses are influencing the way storage is used. Increasingly, data generated in-house and from vendors and customers is being mined to create insight into the world and assert control over the environment.

“Companies cannot know where all the data they will use for business processes will come from. Subsequently, storage systems must provide good flexibility so that data feeds can be dynamically added to analytics environments and data protection services as required.”

Developments at various layers of storage systems tend to improve the entire storage stack, and flash has had a similar impact. Flash improves storage performance about threefold, compared with spinning disks, but storage systems designed to leverage flash systems and object storage systems provide flexible, scalable systems, says Barrera.

“In the data economy, most capacity will be deployed and used through software. Information technology (IT) infrastructure can be provided as virtual software and created and configured for the workloads of the hour. The software-defined environment of modern storage systems allows for integrated and hyperconverged IT infrastructure, with prearchitectured rules for the system to automatically assemble storage, and compute and network capacity as required by various use cases,” he concludes.