James Coomer | Source | Senior Vice President for Products at DDN Storage

Customers continue to demand flexibility in storage media options. The emergence of lower cost QLC storage systems has introduced an additional choice for customers looking to optimize performance and capacity, yet the continued capacity increases in disk drives keeps them as the primary choice for lower-cost cold storage. NVMe flash or storage class memory are now the de facto choices for primary workloads, but hybrid systems continue to see strong demand, especially in systems that use automation to remove the administrative overhead of managing data between tiers.

IT departments are now demanding Opex for storage systems regardless of locality. Public cloud, hosted cloud or on premises systems are being sourced on a pay-per-use basis to avoid expensive upfront capital costs. Additionally, skills shortages have led to a sharp increase in demand for fully managed services on systems deployed in customer data centers. The storage market is maturing faster than other infrastructure areas and vendors must be able to provide flexible pricing, features and services to meet these requests.

The expansion of large AI systems, enterprise and national class AI supercomputers, further drove the need for parallel file systems across many markets for scalability and performance requirements. Manufacturing, life sciences, education and government verticals saw the increased provisioning and growth of parallel file systems in their environments.