In an age where confusing and confounding terms like “hyperconvergence”, “hyperscale” and “disaggregation” get tossed around (even though hardly anybody actually understands what these mean), you may start to wonder what was really wrong with traditional storage in the first place. Is software-defined infrastructure, flash storage and cloud really necessary? The answer is a resounding “yes”. While the differences in storage options today and those available five or ten years ago are truly staggering, the improvements are just as significant.  There are many problems with traditional methods of data storage, but let’s look at a few key issues: