By Muli Ben-Yehuda, Chief Scientist and co-founder of Lightbits Labs

2020 Storage Trends

With the ratification of the NVMe/TCP protocol in late 2018, many companies began their push for creating standards-based, commercial NVMe/TCP products in 2019. We sat down with Lightbits Labs' Chief Scientist and co-founder Muli Ben-Yehuda to discuss 2020 storage trends and how NVMe/TCP will fare in 2020. 

Here are his predictions:

1)    Cloud providers, both large and small, will begin or continue moving to disaggregated storage where storage is handled separately from compute, and away from traditional direct-attached storage (DAS) architecture where storage is located with the compute nodes.

2)    From the top-tier cloud providers to the enterprise level, the trend will be moving from traditional all-flash arrays or storage controllers to more of a cloud-like architecture. And more enterprises will adopt of NVMe/TCP as opposed to NVMe over other fabrics. 

3)    More and more companies will continue to adopt flash as their preferred storage media for its affordable price/performance. Newer NVMe/TCP technologies will further enhance the appeal and benefits of flash by helping to reduce latency.

4)    Emerging flash solutions, including Quad Level Cell (QLC) NAND flash, will also see increasing market traction.  QLC was introduced in 2019 and therefore had only minimal market adoption. That will change in 2020, particularly among companies that have deployed LightOS Global Flash Translation Layer (GFTL) technology to overcome QLC's inherent issues.

5)    As Kubernetes continues its successful assault on the data center, more companies will look for storage for containerized environments that move away from traditional Kubernetes deployments with DAS into more flexible and reliable solutions for persistent container storage that NVMe/TCP can provide.

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About the Author

Muli Ben-Yehuda is the Chief Scientist and co-founder of Lightbits Labs, a startup developing infrastructure for hyperscale clouds. He was previously chief scientist at Stratoscale and researcher and master inventor at IBM Research. He has co-authored over forty academic publications and holds over thirty U.S. patents in such areas as machine and I/O virtualization, cloud computing, and operating system and hypervisor design and implementation. He holds a Master of Science in computer science, summa cumlaude, from the Technion and a Bachelor of Arts, cumlaude, from the Open University of Israel. He is also an inactive Linux kernel maintainer.