It’s been a rollercoaster year for enterprise IT. In much of the world, the economy has come roaring back to life. But we’re not out of the woods yet, as continuing supply disruptions triggered by the pandemic mean that progress has been uneven and fraught. Despite these challenges, it remains a milestone year, as technologies developed throughout the past decade rapidly become commonplace.
Here are our top five developments in enterprise IT from this tumultuous year. Expect to see more of the same as 2022 unfolds.
1. Enterprise IT Fully Embraces the Cloud
Deployment of vaccines in wealthy nations saw the pandemic’s impact somewhat lessen in those regions. COVID-19 has not, however, been eradicated, and its commercial effect lingers.
In particular, it seems that the move to remote work will remain permanent across many companies, at least in hybrid form. This trend fuels another一the inexorable rise of cloud computing.
One noticeable effect of the pandemic was a huge jump in cloud spending across 2020, up 39.1% in 2Q 2020 alone, according to IDC.
Since the pandemic’s heights, cloud spending has come down somewhat, with a 2.4% year-on-year decrease in 2Q 2021 on compute and storage infrastructure. Nevertheless, Gartner projects 23% growth in end-user spending on cloud over this year, with similar advances predicted for 2022.
| Battle of the Titans When it comes to market share of cloud storage, major players still dominate. The three biggest cloud providers make up 60% of global spend, with AWS at 32%, Azure at 21%, and Google Cloud at 8%. |
The overall picture is that cloud infrastructure spending is still on the rise, though down from the explosive growth in 2020. This decrease likely says more about 2020’s extraordinary conditions than it does about 2021, notwithstanding the many challenges with the supply chain.
2. Supply Chain Issues for Enterprise IT
Have you heard? The world is in the midst of a tech crunch, especially when it comes to microchips. Apple alone has lost $6 billion in potential sales due to shortages.
The world’s supply woes have several causes. On the one hand, the rapid rise in smart devices has led to a surge in demand, as entrepreneurs find ways to insert miniaturized computers into any appliance they can get their hands on (smart toaster, anyone?)
On the other hand, lockdowns mean continued disruption and uncertainty. Even if the wealthiest countries are starting to fare better thanks to widespread vaccination, poorer nations where much manufacturing occurs are still struggling.
For example, Covid19 surged in Thailand this summer. This contributed to Quanta Storage, which makes chips for Seagate and WD, seeing its revenues drop 28.1% year-on-year.
A few months later, Malaysia was another hotspot. This wreaked havoc in the auto industry, which depends on Malaysia for chip testing and packaging.
| U.S-China Tensions Chinese energy policy complicates matters further, since Intel, Apple, and Nvidia use Taiwanese companies for semiconductor assembly, and these companies have production facilities on the mainland. Protracted tensions between China and the United States have thwarted cooperation between the two economic giants. |
Nor is the issue with silicon wafers alone. More recently, COVID-19’s impact on Indonesia and Malaysia is disrupting the aluminium capacitor supply.
3. The Relentless Rise of the Edge
Three things in life are certain: death, taxes, and the unstoppable advent of edge computing. More and more devices accumulate and process data, leading to massive growth in the internet of things.
The more data you collect, the tighter you can monitor and control aspects of complex systems. Accordingly, 2021 has seen the continued proliferation of sensors detecting everything from traffic to temperature. Smart cities are on the rise, and that means the edge is more important than it’s ever been.
You can’t talk about the edge without mentioning the transition to 5G adoption by enterprise IT. 5G infrastructure will enable apps which rely on machine learning and low-latency processing.
Never ones to miss out, the major cloud companies are partnering with telecom giants in order to fully take advantage of the capabilities 5G offers. Microsoft has teamed up with AT&T to allow the former’s “Azure End Zones” to support low-latency apps. Meanwhile, Amazon has partnered with Verizon to create AWS Wavelength, which will aim to do the same.
4. Edge Transfer Services
All these sensors and apps will lead to an exponential increase in the size of the global datasphere. That data is valuable, but only if it can get where it needs to go.
This is good news for one rapidly growing industry: edge transfer services. These services help shuttle data from the edge to more centralized locations where it can be put to profitable use.
To circumvent bandwidth limitations, this often involves physically shipping secure, ruggedized, high-capacity drives to their final destination. Cloud providers such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google provide services tied to their own cloud storage, while vendor-neutral services like Lyve data transfer aim to offer more flexibility for enterprise IT customers and smaller businesses too.
5. Enterprise IT and The Race to 20TB
In another positive development, this will be known as the year that 20TB drives finally hit the markets. Intriguingly, they arrived in ways which complicates the narrative that Seagate is the HAMR proponent and Western Digital is holding out for MAMR.
Seagate
For Seagate, 20TB was a long-time coming, something that had been discussed since 2013. Known for its research into Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR), Seagate remains vocally committed to the technology, and has shipped some samples of 20TB HAMR drives to select hyperscalers.
However, there are no plans to mass produce 20TB HAMR drives. Instead, Seagate is ramping up production of 20TB drives using the more traditional PMR technology. These drives also use TDMR, which utilizes multiple read-write heads.
Seagate is still playing the long game though, emphasizing that its focus on HAMR technology will allow it to swiftly increase drive size to 30TB and even 50TB. That’s when it will bring its HAMR play fully to market, it says.
Western Digital
Western Digital are the MAMR (Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording) folks, right? Actually they’re more diverse than that. WD shipped a 20TB energy-assisted drive in 2020, which also utilized shingled magnetic recording.
In addition, WD is making available its 20TB OptiNand drive, which augments a hard drive with a flash unit which can store metadata, allowing for increased capacity and transfer speed.
Neither of the drives in the channel, nor the samples, make use of MAMR, though WD may utilize that technology in future drives.
| Catching Up Toshiba still has no 20TB drives. Instead, it’s making 18TB MAMR drives, which also utilize shingled and two-dimensional recording technology. However, its nearline market share has increased noticeably, expanding from a slim 13.3% in 2019 to a more healthy 21% today. |
Marching On
While 2021 has been a mixed bag, it has offered many silver linings. Despite tremendous odds and continued disruption, tech keeps marching forward and making hay while the sun shines.
The supply crisis aside, much of this year’s news is good. There are novel applications of edge computing, a continued consolidation and simplification of compute and storage, and new technologies being brought to bear on high-capacity storage.
The trajectory of tech mirrors the trajectory of the world economy一while our current troubles are not yet behind us, things are steadily becoming more tractable. Challenges lie ahead, but there is plenty of cause for optimism—provided, of course, the technology is put to good use.
For expert assistance with your data center hardware, get in touch with Horizon Technology and take the hassle out of navigating the global supply chain.
