Comment: Research house Gartner has published its 2023 storage hype cycle, highlighting the evolving landscape of various technologies in the industry, and some have dropped completely out of sight.
The hype cycle serves as a five-stage technology progression chart, starting with an Innovation Trigger phase, followed by a Peak of Inflated Expectations, a Trough of Disillusionment, a Slope of Enlightenment, and finally reaching a Plateau of Productivity.
Gartner Research VP Julia Palmer, who shared the update on LinkedIn, said: “It’s like having a roadmap to navigate through the hype and identify the most promising innovations.” You need to log into a Gartner account to see it in detail. Here we present a screen grab of the highlights:
Technologies on the chart are represented by dot colors: dark blue indicates 5 to 10 years to reach the plateau, light blue represents two to five years, and a white dot indicates less than two years to plateau.
Upon initial analysis, some placements seem unusual. For instance, NVMe-oF should likely be positioned further to the right, and the positions of object storage and Distributed File Systems could potentially be exchanged.
Flash Memory Summit organizer Jay Kramer pointed out some notable omissions from the chart, including Storage Class Memory, Multi-Cloud, and Converged Infrastructure. Here’s last year’s storage hype cycle chart:
Storage Class Memory was rising up the Slope of Enlightenment in 2022 but faced setbacks after Intel discontinued Optane. However, technologies like SCM-class SSDs, MRAM, and RERAM continue to be developed. Notable trends from last year’s storage hype cycle include the disappearance of Copy Data Management, Enterprise Information Archiving, Persistent Memory DIMMs, and Management Software-Defined Storage.
Hybrid Cloud File Data Services have come from nowhere and are now descending the Trough of Disillusionment. There is no entry for CXL, which is expected to play a significant role in storage products. Additionally, we believe that Data Orchestration and SaaS Application Backup deserve a place on the chart.
While the storage hype cycle can be an intriguing insight into the industry’s evolving landscape, it should perhaps be regarded as a fun and less formal representation of the market’s evolution.
