Contributed article by Kieran Harty, Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Tintri

Flash, private clouds, VDI and application-centric storage

As the New Year quickly approaches and we wrap up 2013, there are a few things that come to mind when predicting the hot trends for 2014. Here's my take on what you should expect in the coming year.

Flash becomes table stakes for storage but value added software becomes important

We think that in 2014, a flash story will become a requirement in the storage market. In 2014 (and for the next few years) a hybrid system will provide customers with flash performance in the most economic way. 

We expect the focus to move beyond flash hardware to intelligent software on top of flash. This will drive seamless integration with the virtualization and application layers to allow administrators to focus on managing VMs and application data, rather than just storage.

Increased adoption of VDI

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) has been talked about for many years, but only about 10 percent of desktops have actually been virtualized. This has been changing over the last 18 months because of the availability of cost effective storage and greater adoption of mobile devices. Both users and IT departments prefer to have their desktops on centrally managed servers. 

The adoption of VDI will accelerate in 2014 especially in verticals such as Financial Services, Healthcare, Government and Education.

More private clouds

A lot of attention is given to the public cloud offerings of Amazon, Google and Microsoft. However private clouds (dedicated clouds at customer sites or at service providers) have been growing quietly at a fast rate and will be a $14 billion market in 2016. Private cloud adoption will accelerate in production and development/test environments.

For many companies, a private cloud is the next phase of their adoption of virtualization. It provides customers with an environment with additional flexibility, self-service and reporting. Unlike a public cloud environment like Amazon Web Services, applications don't need to be rewritten to handle failures.

Economic Quality of Service becomes important

With increased consolidation of physical infrastructure and the move to virtualized environments, there are more applications sharing the same server, storage and networking resources. Sharing can result in poor or unpredictable levels of service for individual applications.

For computing resources, the hypervisor already provides efficient Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms. But overprovisioning (think dedicated or underutilized resources) is a common way to approximate QoS for storage and networking. This will become a problem for customers as they perceive this as a waste of resources. In 2014, enterprise customers and service providers will demand QoS mechanisms for storage and networking as a major focus.

Application-Centric Storage gets traction

In 2014 the number of workloads that are virtualized will be more than 70 percent. The efficiency of computing has improved by an order of magnitude and managing virtual machines is a lot simpler than managing physical machines. But storage and networking haven't seen the same benefits as computing. However, this is changing.

The big drivers for IT will be improving storage efficiency, simplifying storage management for virtualized environments and improving the automation of data management. Application-centric storage will reduce Capex and management costs significantly. In the networking world software defined networking (SDN), which is conceptually similar to application-centric storage, will work in parallel to increase efficiency and reduce complexity.

##

About the author