A White Paper, sponsored by Dell Technologies and NVIDIA

High Data Growth and Modern

Applications Drive New Storage
Requirements in Digitally
Transformed Enterprises
RESEARCH BY:

Eric Burgener John Rydning

Research Vice President, Research Vice President,
Infrastructure Systems, Platforms Global Datasphere, IDC
and Technologies Group, IDC

July 20 | IDC Doc. #U7S29354

High Data Growth and Modern Applications Drive New Storage
Requirements in Digitally Transformed Enterprises

Table of Contents
Click on titles or page numbers to navigate to each section.

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Storage Requirements for Digital-First Enterprises. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Dell Unstructured Data Storage Portfolio. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Challenges and Opportunities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

About the Analysts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

A White Paper, sponsored by Dell Technologies and NVIDIA

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High Data Growth and Modern Applications Drive New Storage
Requirements in Digitally Transformed Enterprises

Introduction
In 2018, enterprises began to embark on their digital transformation journeys, with the
ultimate objective of becoming digital-first organizations. Digital-first organizations move
to data-driven business models and thrive by delivering exceptional digital products
to customers who expect digital-first experiences. IDC expects that a large number of
enterprises will be achieving their digital-first goals in the 2023-to-2025 time frame.

To drive the insights that come from data-driven business models, IT organizations are
capturing, storing, protecting, and analyzing more data than ever before. More data and
improved algorithms result in better insights. And data growth at the edge, core, and
cloud, fed by data mobility, big data and analytics, cloud, and social media requirements,
is running rampant. IDC’s Global DataSphere, which forecasts the amount of data that
will be created on an annual basis, predicts that over the next five years, data will grow at
a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.2% to reach more than 221,000 exabytes
(an exabyte is 1,000 petabytes) by 2026. That data will include both structured and
unstructured data, but unstructured data overwhelmingly dominates, accounting for
more than 90% of the data created each year (see Figure 1).

FIGURE 1 200,132
Worldwide Global DataSphere Data Forecast, 2021-2026
(Exabytes) 166,762

138,258

115,258
95,901
80,555

3,892 5,448 7,561 21,046

10,765 15,107

2021 2022 2023 2024 2025 2026

Structured Data Unstructured Data
Source: IDC WW Global DataSphere and Global StorageSphere Structured and Unstructured Data Forecast, 2022-2026

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Unstructured data includes video, photos and images, voice, and documents as well
as other productivity content. The types of activities driving unstructured data creation
include entertainment (primarily streaming media and gaming), the Internet of Things,
non-entertainment images, productivity, social media, and voice. By 2026, entertainment
and non-entertainment image data alone will make up more than 56% of unstructured
data generation. The developing metaverse is expected to be a huge driver of data
growth over the next five years, and its emergence has forecasters shifting predictions
of future data growth strongly upward.

While it is still early days for

the metaverse, IT leaders at
forward-thinking companies
must accelerate their journey
now or risk playing catch-up
with more agile competitors
down the road.

As a concept, the metaverse is still a new idea, but there is no doubt it is providing
innovative new options for socializing, buying things, learning, playing games, and
achieving human fulfillment outside of the real world. What is abundantly clear is that the
foundational technologies of the metaverse — technologies like augmented and virtual
reality — generate massive amounts of data, and trends toward higher-resolution 3D
design collaboration and rendering, increasingly rich digital experiences, and the vast
appetite for data inputs to artificial intelligence, machine learning, and/or deep learning
applications will all act as significant drivers to the growth of primarily unstructured data.

Digital transformation, with its imperative for enterprises to move to more data-centric
business models, requires IT organizations to manage much larger amounts of data
than they did in the past. New approaches now open to digital-first enterprises — like
digital twins, AI-driven real-time decision making, and evolving forms of ecommerce that
enhance customers’ participation in virtual worlds — will strongly drive unstructured data
growth as well. Handling this unstructured data deluge puts significant demands on both
storage and compute infrastructure. Newer scale-out storage architectures, along
with accelerated compute, will need to become part of the IT infrastructure of digitally
transformed enterprises.

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High Data Growth and Modern Applications Drive New Storage
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Storage Requirements
for Digital-First
Enterprises
While enterprises will need to maintain many legacy workloads going forward, the
next-generation applications being developed and deployed as part of digital
transformation efforts in general look very different. Built around microservices
architectures and deployed in containers, most of these workloads will be expected
to operate in a cloud-native manner, even when deployed on premises. To support these
new cloud-native applications, storage infrastructure must support persistent storage in
containers and be interoperable in Kubernetes environments. The coexistence of legacy
workloads along with cloud-native applications requires careful planning and support by
IT personnel.

In IDC’s Future Enterprise Resiliency

and Spending Survey, Wave 10,
October 2021, cybersecurity and
recovery investments were expected
to provide the greatest strategic
advantage for digital business
success in 2022.

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Increasing concerns around data privacy and the rise in ransomware attacks make
security a top priority during the storage infrastructure refresh that more than two-thirds
of IT organizations expect to encounter during their digital transformation efforts.
As many of these next-generation applications will be mission-critical and
customer-facing, they will also need to meet extremely high goals for data availability.

In IDC’s Modernized Infrastructure

Survey, March 2020, 68.2%
of enterprises planned to
modernize their storage
infrastructure as part of their
digital transformation efforts.

Big data analytics workloads have a voracious appetite for data, and most
enterprises will have to manage petabyte-size data sets over the next several years.
Many enterprises are already there. But merely storing the data at the edge, core,
or cloud is not enough; it needs to be readily available for analysis, with the
performance necessary to meet response time requirements. An increasing percentage
of next-generation workloads (like those associated with the metaverse) will be real-time
with each successive year, driving a need for not only very low latency but also very high
concurrency against very large data sets.

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In IDC’s Storage
Infrastructure Portfolio Survey,
September 2020, 62.5% of
enterprises expected that
they would need to support
more real-time response
requirements in the next one
to two years.

With an increasingly dynamic business climate and the need to support hybrid
multicloud–based IT infrastructures, flexibility and agility are critical. In crafting this
type of hybrid IT infrastructure, enterprises are looking for software-defined storage
infrastructure that supports a variety of different on- and off-premises deployment
models. Software-defined solutions provide hardware deployment flexibility, are
easier to manage than more traditional hardware-defined approaches, and offer better
economics. But organizations are also looking for purchasing flexibility and need to be
able to choose among various capital and operating expenditure options.

The more mature digital-first IT organizations know the importance of a unified

management plane that spans on- and off-premises deployment models, providing
comprehensive visibility for monitoring, managing, and troubleshooting distributed
infrastructure. Most enterprises believe that the ability to deploy the same storage
infrastructure software both on premises and in the top public cloud providers makes
hybrid multicloud environments easier to manage (see Figure 2).

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FIGURE 2
Storage Requirements in the Digitally Transformed IT Organization

Cyber-resilient and secure Software-defined agility

with flexible deployment
and purchasing options

Highly scalable while Hybrid multicloud–

delivering consistent capable with a unified
performance management console

Highly available Support for cloud-native

deployments

Source: IDC, 2022

With environment, social, and governance (ESG) considerations beginning to impact

IT infrastructure decisions, IT managers are also looking at green initiatives to improve
storage infrastructure efficiency. Factors like storage density, energy and floor-space
consumption, and server CPU utilization affect not only carbon footprint but also overall
costs, and improving infrastructure efficiency is another key reason IT managers are
looking to modernize their storage infrastructure during digital transformation.

Accelerated compute will be a key part of most enterprises’ infrastructure

modernization projects. Legacy storage systems have had trouble keeping up with
the general-purpose CPU advancements over the last decade. To use the additional
performance of accelerated compute requires newer storage architectures that can
provide low latency, handle massive parallelism, and offer integration points that help
to more fully utilize and improve the efficiency of graphics processing units (GPUs),
application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs),
and other accelerated compute options.

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Dell Unstructured Data

Storage Portfolio

Dell is a $92 billion enterprise infrastructure provider that has been a longtime
market-share-by-revenue leader in both servers and storage. Dell has a comprehensive
enterprise storage portfolio that meets both structured and unstructured storage
needs; includes both scale-up and scale-out architectures; spans entry-level, midrange,
and high-end offerings; features edge, core, and cloud-based platforms; and
supports excellent integration into virtualized infrastructure as well as hybrid
multicloud environments.

Dell’s unstructured data storage portfolio includes Dell PowerScale, Dell ObjectScale,
Dell ECS, and Dell Streaming Data Platform (SDP). Dell PowerScale is a highly scalable
native file storage platform with enterprise-class availability and storage management
capabilities that supports a broad range of access methods for highly efficient workload
consolidation. Dell ObjectScale (software-defined option) and Dell ECS (appliance
option) are highly scalable native object storage platforms, both supporting modern
workloads such as artificial intelligence, analytics, and media content as well as more
traditional backup and archive object storage workloads. Dell SDP is built around
Pravega, a cloud-native streaming infrastructure specifically designed for continuously
generated and unbounded data, and can leverage PowerScale, ObjectScale, and ECS at
its core (see Figure 3, next page).

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FIGURE 3
Dell’s Unstructured Data Portfolio Covers a Range of Unstructured
Data Storage Needs

EDGE

CORE

Streaming
PowerScale Data CLOUD
Platform
Data File

First Object

Foundation Streams

ObjectScale
and ECS

Source: Dell Technologies, 2022

A variety of mixed media types are supported between the two object platforms
(ObjectScale and ECS), giving customers the flexibility to put performance and
cost-effective high capacity where it is needed, and they both are built around
software-defined, scale-out architectures that can scale to tens of petabytes and
beyond. Kubernetes support is built into these systems, and they can be deployed in
on- or off-premises locations in storage clusters that support all-flash, hybrid, and archive
nodes. All platforms can be purchased outright or acquired through Dell Technologies
APEX, the vendor’s portfolio of as-a-service offerings that provides pay-as-you-go
options for core, edge, colocation, and public cloud–based deployments. The APEX
Console provides a unified management plane that lets customers choose and configure
cloud and infrastructure subscriptions to match their business needs, (see Table 1,
next page).

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TABLE 1
Mapping Dell PowerScale and Dell Object Platforms
(ObjectScale and ECS) to Digital-First Storage Requirements
Requirement Dell PowerScale Dell Object Platforms

OneFS Zero Trust Model for security,

Highly distributed erasure coding, 256-bit
256-bit encryption, FIPS compliance,
Cyber resiliency and security SmartLock for immutability, ransomware
encryption, versioning, resource isolation,
global identity and access management,
attack prevention, detection, and recovery,
ObjectLock for immutability
air gap protection

Low latency with NVMe-based all-flash “F” Support for flash and spinning disk media,
High performance and scalability nodes, QoS, scale up to 252 nodes, tens of hundreds of petabytes of capacity, and
petabytes and almost 1TB/sec of bandwidth multiple TBs/sec of bandwidth (no cluster
under a single unified namespace node count limit)

Erasure coding or file replicas, transparent

Geographically distributed erasure coding,
recovery from device and node failures,
High availability snapshots, and replication, SyncIQ for
transparent recovery from device and node
failures, snapshots, and replication
simple DR failover/failback

Software-defined deployment Deploy as an appliance, on selected Intel

Deploy as an appliance, on selected Intel
flexibility x86-based servers, in virtual machines or
x86-based servers, and in containers
containers, and in the public cloud

Automated tiering to S3 storage in on- or

Multicloud–capable with unified off-premises locations through SmartSync,
Participates in SmartPools, CloudPools;
management SmartPools, CloudPools; support for
APEX Console support planned
Amazon, Azure and Google public cloud
deployment, supported in APEX Console

COSI support planned, Kubernetes support,

CSI support, Kubernetes support, REST
Support for cloud-native APIs for integration into management,
deploy on Red Hat OpenShift or VMware
deployments orchestration and directory tools,
Tanzu, REST APIs for integration into
management, orchestration and directory
container-based deployment
tools; container-based deployment

Source: IDC, 2022

While the Dell PowerScale, ObjectScale, ECS, and SDP configurations include features
that map directly to the requirements of digitally transforming organizations, the
platforms include capabilities that deliver additional benefits as well.

Dell PowerScale includes at-scale optimizations for in-line data protection, in-line data
reduction capabilities (compression, deduplication) that improve cost efficiency, multiple
replication topologies, nondisruptive multigenerational technology refresh, and a simple
“snap to object” feature that makes it simple to create a comprehensive recovery copy
of an entire namespace. Additional performance features include Network File System
(NFS) over remote direct memory access (RDMA) host connection and support for
NVIDIA’s GPUDirect storage API. Recently released quad-level cell (QLC) drive support
delivers twice the cluster capacity, twice the node density, and lower costs without any
increase in power, cooling, or floor-space requirements.

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The Dell Validated Design for VDI with NVIDIA Omniverse

NVIDIA is a leading supplier of accelerated The powerful NVIDIA A40 GPUs need
compute technology deployed across high-performance storage to keep them operating
enterprises, government agencies, and efficiently, and Dell’s partnership with NVIDIA has
research laboratories alike. produced NVIDIA-Certified Systems that deliver
NVIDIA Omniverse is an easily extensible on this requirement. The Dell Validated Design
for virtual desktop integration (VDI) with NVIDIA
platform for 3D design collaboration and
Omniverse and NVIDIA RTX Virtual Workstation
scalable multi-GPU, real-time,
(vWS) software uses a VxRail-based virtual
true-to-reality simulation that is fueling workstation environment with VMware Horizon
the efforts of many organizations and PowerScale as the core media repository,
playing in the metaverse. and is validated with Autodesk Maya 3D animal
and visual effects software.

Dell Object platforms include different erasure coding scheme options, a comprehensive
S3 API implementation, intelligent workload sizing, native multi-tenancy with resource
isolation and secure access, nondisruptive technology refresh, and advanced retention,
indexing, replication, and reporting features that help to ensure data compliance. In the
future, Dell will support a nondisruptive upgrade to ObjectScale from the Dell ECS object
storage platform that has been shipping since 2014.

All systems support a number of different device-type capacities, allowing customers

to select the mix that best meets their performance, capacity, and cost requirements.

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The primary use cases for Dell PowerScale include media and entertainment, healthcare
(e.g., DNA sequencing), research, technology, telecommunications, autonomous
driving, agriculture, public safety, general-purpose file sharing, and a variety of artificial
intelligence – based, performance-intensive, and other technical computing workloads
across a variety of industries.

The primary use cases for Dell ObjectScale include cloud-native web and mobile
applications, test/dev, consolidated data lakes, artificial intelligence and machine
learning, data analytics, the IoT, and backup and archive. ECS use cases generally
exclude cloud-native applications but are otherwise similar. Both storage platforms can
be used with the emerging, more performance-oriented big data analytics across many
industries, with ECS in particular supporting those workloads through available NVMe
support options.

Dell unstructured data storage platforms offer the performance, availability, scalability,
and comprehensive enterprise-class management capabilities needed for both legacy
and modern workloads that will be deployed as part of digital transformation.

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Challenges and
Opportunities

As enterprises go through digital transformation, deciding where to place workloads

is a key consideration. Given that most enterprises will be using hybrid multicloud
environments going forward, IT infrastructure choices need to support the flexibility
necessary to accommodate both older and newer workloads in both on- and
off-premises locations. The challenge for vendors is to evolve with the times, providing
the set of capabilities required to support the massive unstructured data growth
being driven by the burgeoning metaverse era. Vendors that do flexibly support those
capabilities are providing the foundation on which their customers can effectively
differentiate themselves from their own competitors.

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Conclusion

There will be an explosion in unstructured data over the next five years, driven by
digital transformation, the metaverse, and a number of other data-centric trends.
Capturing, storing, protecting, and analyzing this data while meeting evolving business
requirements will be increasingly difficult for legacy storage infrastructure, and
enterprises are looking to newer, more software-defined scale-out designs. The storage
infrastructure platforms of the future need to be cyber-resilient and secure, able to
deliver performance at higher levels of scale than ever before, highly available with
quick recovery, and software-defined for flexibility. They also need to support hybrid
multi-public-cloud environments that are managed by a unified management console
and provide the necessary support for cloud-native applications. Vendors like Dell
that offer a broad, proven unstructured data storage portfolio, unified hybrid cloud
management, and flexible consumption models, along with integration into accelerated
compute technology from leaders like NVIDIA, provide the foundation on which
successful digital-first enterprises can be built.

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About the Analysts

Eric Burgener
Research Vice President, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and
Technologies Group, IDC
Eric Burgener is Research Vice President within IDC’s Enterprise
Infrastructure Practice. Eric’s core research coverage includes
Storage Systems, Software and Solutions, quarterly trackers, end-user
research as well as advisory services and consulting programs.
Based on his background coverage on enterprise storage, Eric’s
research includes a particular emphasis on flash-optimized arrays,
emerging persistent memory technologies, and software-defined
storage. He is an active participant in the IT Buyers Research Program
at IDC and blogs throughout the year on the topic of Infrastructure and
Data Management.

More about Eric Burgener

John Rydning
Research Vice President, Global Datasphere, IDC
John Rydning is responsible for the Global DataSphere forecast, which
measures the amount of data created by year and also for the Global
StorageSphere forecast, which is a measure of the installed base of
storage capacity worldwide, and the amount of data stored in any
given year. Additionally, John leads insightful research that explores
key trends, use cases, technologies, and other factors shaping both
the Global DataSphere and StorageSphere.

More about John Rydning

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