Storage is a fast-evolving industry. Groundbreaking hardware technologies quickly become commoditized, which is a challenge for vendors, but a great benefit to customers. Today’s shiny new array soon becomes matched by a similarly capable JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disk) product that might not have as robust of vendor support, but costs the enterprise far less than a brand-name system. This commoditization extends into flash as well.
While it is still growing in adoption in the enterprise, Gartner already sees JBOF (Just a Bunch of Flash) products on the horizon in this segment as well. Cloud storage is on the rise in tandem with flash, and smart data management software can help enterprises overcome the complexity of cloud adoption and easily integrate JBOC (Just a Bunch of Cloud) with their existing architectures.
