Enterprises today want real-time, consistent, connected, and trusted data to support their critical business operations and insights. Any delay in the availability of data can have a negative impact on businesses. Ever-expanding data volumes, new governance requirements, data silos across clouds and on-premises, etc., can cause enterprises to slow down on their data strategy and create business challenges. Therefore, data storage and protection systems remain critical to managing IT infrastructure.

Cloud native technology brings new challenges and opportunities to the storage world. Data movement from on-premises to the cloud or between the clouds, immutable snapshot requirements due to ransomware attacks, edge computing, machine learning, AI, and 5G need to connect and collect everything. Data governance laws bring interesting use cases from a storage perspective and demand changes in storage platforms and operational models.

SODA Foundation’s objective is to bring all open source data and storage efforts under one umbrella. SODA Foundation has many goals, including building solutions for end users, integrating with other open source projects, standardizing data management, and obtaining deeper sector insights to keep our projects aligned with the industry trends. We have seen more companies joining the SODA Foundation, either as full members or in supporting roles, end users, or part of the ecosystem.

With the move to the cloud continuing, application modernization, and related challenges including hybrid and multi-cloud adoption and regulatory compliance requirements, we want to ensure we address the right priorities in the near term. To accomplish these goals, every year, we conduct a comprehensive survey of the current data and storage landscape and the role open source plays in it.

This report is the culmination of the 2022 Data and Storage Trends survey conducted in partnership with the Linux Foundation Research team. To expand our reach across different domains, we invited other open source communities, such as Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), Open Infrastructure Foundation, Storage Performance Council, Japan Data Storage Forum, China Opensource Cloud League, Mulan Opensource Community, and others, to participate in the distribution of the survey. Without their support, this report would not be possible.

In terms of innovation, every technology goes through a hype cycle. Currently, computational storage, immutable data vault, container backup, and container-native storage are at the peak of inflated expectations, while hybrid and multi-cloud storage are gaining expectations. This survey shows that data analytics is the leading production workload.

While some findings of this report, such as the rise of cloud native and hybrid cloud, align with the visible trends, we see that the organizations plan to use open source software, most notably for multi and hybrid cloud data management.

We also wanted to re-evaluate how businesses are dealing with open source software. Open source code is prevalent in software packages, from business applications to network and server processes. According to a recent study (2022 Synopsys Open Source Security and Risk Analysis), open source code running in software is at an all-time high.

Often, enterprises are unaware of the use of open source code in their software because it is deeply embedded, and they don’t have the inventory of the open source code in it. This causes problems related to policies, licenses, vulnerabilities, and versions. The recent Log4j vulnerability is an interesting example of that.

Despite these issues, we see from the survey results that the top reason companies adopt open source software is quality, reliability, and security. We hope this work will help guide the technology and business leaders in their decision-making and strategic approaches. We would like to thank the Linux Foundation Research team for assisting in this crucial research, our survey partners, and all SODA foundation members who helped develop and participate in the survey and other aspects of this report.

Rakesh Jain
TOC Co-chair, SODA Foundation
Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM Research