Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2016. Read them in this 8th Annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Steven Lamb, CEO ioFABRIC
OpEx will be at the top of every IT’s list for 2016
Despite
our best efforts in predicting the direction of the storage industry each year
there are always unforeseen events that catch us off guard. Long-gestating
acquisitions are suddenly completed revealing bigger bricks still can't float;
companies come out of stealth mode; someone exits their funding rounds with an jaw
dropping IPO valuation. And while any of these events can take us by surprise
again in the upcoming year, 2016 should see more gradual, evolutionary progress
rather than the dramatic one-time event to rock the industry.
The
hype of the cloud will continue its transformation into a real-world business
model with increased adoption of hybrid clouds in 2016. Performance and
compliance concerns will necessitate that companies still keep a significant
amount of storage capacity on-premises, but an ever-increasing amount of data
will be moved to the cloud to alleviate capacity concerns and to leverage the
cost-saving benefits of cloud economics.
Likewise,
the widely hyped "all-flash" data center will reveal itself to instead be more
of a "hybrid" data center with a greater split between flash and hard drives to
balance the concerns of performance vs. capacity with the realities of IT
budget allowances. Spinning drive purchases will shift to the slowest, largest
drives for inactive and archive data, with flash as the preferred active data
storage device.
2016
will be the year when companies address the elephant in the room. That storage
OPEX costs 2-3x storage CAPEX and driving down hardware costs doesn't lead to
overall budget improvements. Companies have to actively manage storage in a
different way to take advantage of CAPEX reduction without inadvertently
driving up OPEX. They will look towards SDS solutions that
lower OPEX through automation and orchestration, which enables those CAPEX efficiencies
that makes finance happy. The Companies that can find these ways to control and
lower these expenditures will be the winners.
Once
again, the trend in 2016 will be to do more with less while extending hardware
life. To ensure that CAPEX does not rise as organizations look to minimize
OPEX, the use of commodity hardware with existing infrastructures in
conjunction with SDS offerings will bring about the most bang for the buck.
Data centers will no longer
have to source all storage from single vendors because software that manages
storage will unify all disparate systems.
In 2016,
the approaching death of SAN and NAS will become apparent as the move to other
storage architectures continue to be preferred. Centralized storage is under
attack from distributed, converged, and hyper-converged models which will continue
to grow at its expense.
Any or all of the above will
be the catalyst for seismically shifting the storage industry from where it was
to where it needs to go but there shouldn't be any other earth-shattering events
to disrupt the progress that has been made thus far.
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About the Author
For more than a quarter century,
Steven Lamb has been at the forefront of the data storage, Internet security
and e-commerce industries. Whether as a visionary, foretelling where
these industries should be heading, or as an influencer, helping direct
organizations to solutions that best suit their business objectives, Lamb
offers a broad range of strategic positioning, management skills and leadership
experience.
On the corporate side, Lamb has
successfully led several growth-stage technology companies from incubation
through acquisition. As CEO and co-founder of ioFABRIC, he guides a team
of experienced executives as they deliver dramatic simplification and cost
savings to storage infrastructure.
Lamb holds a Bachelor of Applied
Science in Engineering and a Master of Science in Physics from the University
of Toronto.