Quantum CEO Predictions for 2020

Autonomous vehicle development increasingly human-centric, increased adoption of HCI for video surveillance, video and images biggest data generator for enterprises, NVMe to erode SAS SSD array faster, tape market growing reversing decade-long declining

• Autonomous vehicle development will become increasingly human-centric: as OEMs and their technology partners strive to closely align assisted and autonomous driving technology to human behavior. In order to develop systems that adapt to the characteristics of individual drivers or riders, immense amounts of behavioral data must be captured and analyzed, including bio-metric, in addition to external sensor and vehicle control system data. This means the need for cost-effective storage performance and scalability will continue to skyrocket.

• HCI will see increased adoption in video surveillance: IHS predicts worldwide surveillance storage revenue will grow from $3.4 billion in 2019 to $4.2 billion in 2020. Growth is driven by increased demand for better security, smart city and public safety initiatives (public sector), and the desire for business intelligence. Legacy systems require individual components to address compute, storage and networking while HCI for video surveillance integrates all 3 into single platform, delivering easier to install and manage appliances that do not require that security professionals rely on specialized IT assistance. Moreover, HCI appliances enable storage to scale so that when environments grow, the platform can grow too – a challenge amplified by increases in camera counts, camera resolutions, and video retention times. They provide a solid underlying platform to deploy new capabilities, both today and tomorrow.

• Video and images represent biggest data generator for most enterprises: Between surveillance footage, video for marketing and training purposes across all industries, and the use of high-res image and video content generated by machines in use cases as diverse as movie and TV production, autonomous vehicle design, manufacturing, healthcare – we believe video and high-res image content will represent biggest ‘class’ of data for most enterprises.

• NVMe will erode traditional SAS SSD array market faster than originally predicted: With the performance advantages of NVMe, and by leveraging new networking technologies like RDMA, we believe NVMe will erode the market for traditional SSD storage much faster than predicted. In markets such as M&E where higher resolution content combined with higher frame rates, more bits per pixel and more cameras per project are putting pressure on storage architectures, NVMe should prove particularly appealing.

• Tape storage market will grow, reversing a decade-long declining trend: Tape has emerged as a key technology for massive scale cold storage infrastructure – both in the cloud and on-premise. And we believe the architectures used in the cloud will eventually make their way back into the enterprise. So we believe the tape market will grow, and continue to grow over the next 5-10 years, based on a new use case for tape as cold storage for (primarily) video and high res image data.