Hype Cycle for Storage and Data Protection Technologies, 2020
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Hype Cycle for Storage and Data Protection Technologies, 2020 Published 6 July 2020 - ID G00441602 - 78 min read By Analysts Julia Palmer Initiatives:Data Center Infrastructure This Hype Cycle evaluates storage and data protection technologies in terms of their business impact, adoption rate and maturity level to help IT leaders build stable, scalable, efficient and agile storage and data protection platform for digital business initiatives. Analysis What You Need to Know The storage and data protection market is evolving to address new challenges in enterprise IT such as exponential data growth, changing demands for skills, rapid digitalization and globalization of business, requirements to connect and collect everything, and expansion of data privacy and sovereignty laws. Requirements for robust, scalable, simple and performant storage are on the rise. As the data center no longer remains the center of data, IT leaders expect storage to evolve from being delivered by rigid appliances in core data centers to flexible storage platforms capable of enabling hybrid cloud data flow at the edge and in the public cloud. Here, Gartner has assessed 24 of the most relevant storage and data protection technologies that IT leaders must evaluate to address the fast-evolving needs of the enterprise. For more information about how peer I&O leaders view the technologies aligned with this Hype Cycle, see “2020-2022 Emerging Technology Roadmap for Large Enterprises.” The Hype Cycle IT leaders responsible for storage and data protection must cope with the rapidly changing requirements of digital business, exponential data growth, introduction of new workloads, and the desire to leverage public cloud and enable edge capabilities. This research informs I&O leaders and infrastructure technology vendors about innovative storage technologies that are entering the market, and shows how Gartner evaluates highly hyped technologies or concepts and how quickly enterprises are adopting innovative technologies. More than half of the technologies reviewed in the 2020 Hype Cycle are posed to mature over the next five to 10 years, while 60% of technologies have a potential to deliver high benefits if driven by genuine business requirements. To provide readers with clearer, more focused research that supports their analysis and planning, this year we have removed a number of innovation profiles that are no longer hyped. We have only included the ones that are most relevant to IT leaders today, as well as those with a strong link to the storage and data protection Hype Cycle and its theme. Gartner, Inc. | 441602 Page 1/45 There are three new innovation profiles that have been added in 2020: computational storage, container backup and dHCI. While very different in their value proposition, these technologies reflect IT leaders’ priorities to take advantage of new flash technologies, improve and modernize data protection, and leverage new deployments modes for storage and data protection platforms. Fast-moving technologies this year include storage-class memory SSDs, NVMe-oF and hyperconvergence, which all continue to show increased adoption rates, driven largely by a desire to leverage storage software innovation to enable performant, yet resilient, storage infrastructure based on industry-standard hardware. Figure 1. Hype Cycle for Storage and Data Protection Technologies, 2020 The Priority Matrix The Priority Matrix maps the benefit rating for each technology against the length of time before Gartner expects it to reach the beginning of mainstream adoption. This alternative perspective can help users determine how to prioritize their storage hardware, software and data protection technology investments, and adoption. In general, companies should begin with fast-moving technologies that are rated transformational or high in business benefits and are likely to reach mainstream adoption quickly. These technologies tend to have the most dramatic impact on business processes, revenue or cost- cutting efforts. After these transformational technologies, users are advised to evaluate high- Gartner, Inc. | 441602 Page 2/45 impact technologies that will reach mainstream adoption status in the near term, and work downward and to the right from there. Organizations that have not already done so should evaluate and implement continuous data protection and virtual machine backup and recovery to drive improved resiliency and data protection efficiency. They should also consider implementation of distributed file systems and object storage to address the growing needs of unstructured data. Hyperconverged infrastructure solutions are increasing in popularity, experiencing year-over-year growth while replacing storage arrays for enterprises looking to improve simplicity of management and streamline implementation in the data center and at the edge. Figure 2. Priority Matrix for Storage and Data Protection Technologies, 2020 Off the Hype Cycle The cloud storage gateways innovation profile has been removed because it became Obsolete Before Plateau. Gartner, Inc. | 441602 Page 3/45 The following profiles have been removed because they have reached maturity and are no longer hyped: ■ Enterprise endpoint backup ■ Virtual machine backup and recovery The following profiles have changed as stated: ■ NVMe and NVMe-oF was changed to NVMe-oF. ■ Storage-class memory has been split into two profiles: persistent memory DIMMs and storage- class memory SSDs. On the Rise Data Transport and Edge Appliances Analysis By: Raj Bala; Julia Palmer; Santhosh Rao Definition: Data transport and edge appliances are physical devices capable of transporting bulk data to cloud infrastructure and platform service (CIPS) providers via package carriers rather than solely relying on a network to transfer data. Such appliances are often designed with ruggedized cases to be self-contained shipping units. The appliances optionally can be equipped with compute capacity in order to preprocess data before being transported to the cloud. Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Data transfer and edge appliances are emerging as an efficient means of transporting large quantities of data when no network or less-than-ideal network conditions exist. Data transfer and edge appliances are playing an important role in enabling data transfer from the data centers or edge location to CIPS environments for processing and analytics. Gartner clients are evaluating ways to enable a continuous collection of data centralized in the cloud at significant scale for which network-based transfer is simply too limited. User Advice: Enterprises are increasingly interested in using CIPS for an ever-expanding set of workloads, but find migrating such workloads and the data they require to be a challenge. As a general guide, moving 10TB of data in a 24-hour period requires a 10 Gbps network link. Such large network links may not be feasible depending on the amount of new data being generated per day. The physical movement of data is merely part of the challenge. Planning the procedure and preparing the data take more effort and often more time than the shipment itself. Start planning these data shipments well in advance of the date on which you need to ship the appliance. Business Impact: Getting data to the public cloud can be challenging due to network bottlenecks. There are distinct advantages to shipping data using transfer appliances when the data is unwieldy and the network bandwidth is constrained. Enterprise backups, for example, can be Gartner, Inc. | 441602 Page 4/45 seeded at the public cloud target such that only incremental backups need to be sent to the cloud. Data can be collected in low- or no-network conditions to then be processed using public cloud services. Benefit Rating: Moderate Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience Maturity: Emerging Sample Vendors: Amazon Web Services (AWS); Backblaze; Google; IBM; Microsoft; Oracle; Wasabi Recommended Reading: “Market Guide for Cloud IaaS Data Transport and Edge Appliances” Hybrid Cloud Storage Analysis By: Raj Bala; Julia Palmer Definition: Hybrid cloud storage encompasses a number of deployment patterns with varying underlying technologies. It can take the form of purpose-built hybrid cloud storage appliances, software-defined storage, broader storage systems with hybrid cloud features or the use of storage technologies from within colocation facilities connected by private network link to cloud service providers. The common thread among the varying patterns is the notion of a seamless bridge between disparate data centers and public cloud storage services. Position and Adoption Speed Justification: The term “hybrid cloud storage” was first used in 2009 by vendors in the cloud storage gateway segment to describe their nascent offerings. Those early hybrid cloud products treated public cloud storage as an archive tier for infrequently used, low- value data. But the current market for hybrid cloud storage has moved well-past the early products in the cloud storage gateway market. Hybrid cloud storage is now used for modern workloads that transform data using the elasticity that public cloud compute provides. These workloads typically start off as large, bulky datasets that require transformation to a smaller result. Examples include videos and a broad range of analytics-oriented data. In the case of videos, artifacts of a video are collected over time and then rendered into a final result using the compute capabilities of public cloud IaaS providers. User Advice: Evaluate vendors of hybrid