Dynamic of Technology haven’t left the storage domain undisturbed either, with the competition of other data-vs-space growing stronger day by day, storage has become a key focus area for enterprises. Kartik Shankar, Senior Sales Manager, StorIT Distribution talks about the future is going to be all about converged and software define storage.

Kartik Shankar - StorIT

• What are the current trends in storage solutions deployment in the Middle East?
More businesses are investing huge amounts of resources into their infrastructures by bringing in storage as an essential requirement to all classes of business. Organizations need to consider solutions which provide a secure and seamless integration of storage into their existing IT setup. Deployment is also affected by the performance levels and the scalability of the storage. They need to also ensure that the invested solution is cost effective for their data centre.

• What changes can we expect in the enterprise storage segment in this region over the next few months?
Storage architecture is undergoing drastic changes with the emerging models being unified, scale-up, scale-out and full flash based storage. Most storage models now need to be compatible and easily integrated with virtualization, and going forward with cloud and big data solutions.
Software defined storage is another trend that will see an increased uptake as it offers enterprises increased flexibility, automated management and cost efficiency over traditional storage models. Converged infrastructure is becoming the most important building block of a modern data center infrastructure.
Enterprise are moving towards SSDs which can be leveraged to speed up applications and performance without the cost of adding additional servers. The storage arrays are fast becoming full solid state, where the speeds will double every 2 years.

• What role will software-defined and virtualized storage play in the Middle Eastern market?
Virtualization has been gaining momentum and storage virtual machines are geared up to provide application agility. The future of storage is software-led and that too open system based. Many existing vendors will build building blocks and frameworks around it thus exploiting the open source better than others by introducing features rich options for their customers. Platforms will standardize over a software layer and all hardware will see a variant or two of the software communicating with each other.
The race towards software defined storage is at its peak. The key benefits of software-defined storage over traditional storage are increased flexibility, automated management and cost efficiency. Converged infrastructure becomes the most compelling building block of data center infrastructure.

• What are the factors driving the adoption of converged storage?
Organizations today are looking to make their IT infrastructure simple and easily manageable. Earlier, storage and computing would be separate entities but with the increase in data and the growing demand for resources in the virtual, physical and cloud-based environments, it has become necessary for companies to look at converged storage solutions, where the storage and computing hardware are integrated to optimize network and application performance, minimize physical space requirements and increase speed of delivery. Government organizations, enterprises and large companies are looking at ways to reduce risks as the scope of threats grows. They are looking for fast and efficient converged storage solutions for their data centers, which is one of the main factors driving the adoption of converged storage solutions in the region.