
Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2014. Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed article by Noam Shendar, VP of Business Development, Zadara Storage
Enterprise Cloud Floodgates Open, "as-a-Service" Reigns
We've heard it before, but this time it's for real. The year 2014 will see enterprise applications
move to the cloud en masse, and the data center itself become more like the
cloud.
All signs point to Enterprise Cloud floodgates opening. It's a perfect storm: the technology has
matured, the customers have taken the time to get comfortable with the
approach, and pricing has become too good to resist. Big databases, CRM and financials will move
over, and once they depart the on-premises world, cloud agility, economics and
scale will keep them there.
$0.01 is the new $0.10. Today $0.01/GB/month is
the going rate for archival storage and $0.10/GB/month is the going rate for
online storage. Google has just
announced $0.04/GB/month for online storage.
It's amazing how quickly storage costs are plummeting. How much can the gap shrink by this time next
year?
Virtual Storage completes the cloud, and "as-a-Service"
reigns. Compute is already well
virtualized, and SDN is making networking the next wave of virtualization. All
that remains of the "data center troika" is storage, whose
virtualization is a perfect companion for Storage as a Service (STaaS).
Storage-as-a-Service will continue to take primary
storage from incumbents. IDC's Q3 2013 external disk storage report
showed a 5.6% decline from the prior year's Q3, as did the open networked disk
storage systems business. Cloud
storage has been siphoning off business from traditional storage hardware
vendors, mainly for disaster recovery, backup and archive. In 2014 we will see continued high
double-digit growth in Storage-as-a-Service (cloud-based STaaS) approaches,
driven by primary storage moving to the cloud and facilitated by
enterprise-grade features.
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About the Author
Noam Shendar is VP of
Business Development at Zadara Storage, a provider of enterprise Storage as a
Service (STaaS) solutions. He has over
15 years of experience with enterprise technologies including at LSI Corporation,
MIPS Technologies, entertainment technology startup iBlast, and Intel.