Welcome to the Year of the Predictable: Page 4 of 4

Storage/BDR

Signage solutions are but one contributor to what will be predictably strong demand for storage in 2022, according to Greg Schulz, founder and senior adviser at analyst firm and consultancy StorageIO. “More data continues to be generated,” he notes.

IDC, in fact, expects data creation and replication to grow at a 23% CAGR through 2025. As a result, the analyst predicts, the 6.7 zettabytes of storage capacity in use as of 2020, the last full year for which figures are currently available, will climb at a 19.2% CAGR over the same period. To put that number in context, each zettabyte is a billion terabytes.

Despite exploding use of cloud solutions, a lot of that data will reside on premises, and not just in corporate data centers. “We’re seeing more storage actually being deployed out at the edge,” Schulz says. Research from Gartner confirms that trend. While just 10% of business data was created and processed outside a traditional data center or cloud last year, the analyst says, 75% will be by 2025.

Much of that data will reside on good old-fashioned hard drives, according to Schulz. Though adoption of flash storage, which is faster than disks, continues to soar, HDDs remain a more affordable option for data that isn’t used heavily.

“They’re better together,” says Schulz of flash and disks.

They’re also equally vulnerable to attackers and corruption, which is why companies will take BDR even more seriously in 2022, according to Schulz. “It’s not just having more copies of your data,” he says. “It’s also having more versions of those copies as well as copies of those versions that are kept in different locations.”

It’s a harbinger too—and a predictable one at that—of fresh sales ahead for the SMB channel.

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