TRP: HGST claims to address the future of data storage with Active Archive? How is that possible?
BM: HGST believes that the future of IT is tied to IDC's concept of the third platform. This means that people and data are increasingly mobile, apps and users number in the millions and interact through new social outlets. Big data is needed to explore these social interconnections, and cloud services can enable this.
Storage systems are also entering the third platform. First, there was block based DAS, then came file based client-server. These previous generations of storage systems were not designed to meet the requirements of today's IT environment, which demands scalability and access anywhere, anytime and through any platform.
Object storage meets the needs of the third platform. However, meeting those needs is the minimum requirement; our object based Active Archive System goes further by offering Simplicity at Scale in one pre-configured rack. Roll it in, apply power and a network connection and you're off; easy to deploy, easy to manage and easy to scale.
TRP: Can you tell us more about that new strategic partnership you're announcing?
BM: The HGST Active Archive System transforms into a best-of-breed solution by connecting the ecosystem dots for our customers. Commvault is a leader in data management and information access and with HGST, Active Archive creates a powerful solution to eliminate many of the well documented pain points associated with mechanical tape, multiple copies of data to manage, exponential amounts of data to store, access and backup.
Enterprises need to adopt better solutions to address these concerns and remain competitive. The Commvault partnership is the first of many expected to hit the streets in the next several months.
TRP: Where do you see the enterprise data storage market moving over the next 12 months?
BM: We believe that smaller enterprises will begin to adopt hyper-converged systems to run their mission critical data applications, as performance delivered by flash and NVME will more than meet their needs. Fibre channel will remain for legacy environments, but new implementations will look to Ethernet based systems with scale-out capabilities. It is likely that the smaller enterprise will look to cloud hosted solutions for many of its business applications, hosted by the SaaS provider on cloud infrastructure.
At the other end of the scale, large data centres will turn to converged infrastructure, increasingly adopting open-source technologies like Docker containers for virtualised environments. Enterprises will look to cloud infrastructure to manage their data growth. Likely this will be a combination of public and private cloud, but it will rely on massively scalable object storage platforms to support its data growth requirements.
