Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2016.  Read them in this 8th Annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Kieran Harty and Brandon Salmon, Tintri

There Will be Blood

1.  There will be blood - 2016 will be marked by consolidation and storage startups exiting the market

The Dell/EMC acquisition is merely the starting point. Other large, established storage companies will most certainly feel the pressure this year, which will lead them to (1) make acquisitions, or (2) go private. As for the next gen storage vendors, given the billions invested in storage startups, the companies with less than a few hundred million in funding won't be able to scale fast enough to survive. This shakeout started in 2015-it's going to get messier in 2016. 

2.  Some of the shine around hyperconverged will wear off

The hype around hyperconverged ramped up in 2015, as some vendors blurred the lines between hyperconverged and web-sale. In 2016, more people will realize that companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon, which have been building web-scale infrastructures, have set-ups that don't remotely resemble hyperconverged. As more virtualized enterprises realize the limitations of hyperconverged and establish a need to scale server and storage separately, they will instead gravitate more towards converged solutions.

3.  DevOps takes a seat at the storage table

The Software, Test and Development teams had limited roles in storage decision-making in the past, but in 2016 they take a seat at the table. The pressure to speed development cycles means DevOps requirements are factored into storage purchases-they will need to be quickly scaled and simply managed-on-premise or via cloud.

4.  Organizations look further into their storage future

Most organizations have 6-to-12 month planning cycles for their storage requirements, but rely on spreadsheets plus good ol' pen and paper to work through future planning. In 2016, organizations will use better tools to mine gold from historical capacity, performance and throughput data and precisely model their future needs. This will help them make better decisions about how, where and when to procure the right storage set-up.

5.  The private cloud like we've never seen it before

Private cloud is nothing new, but in 2016 we expect to see a greater mixture of new applications (cloud native applications) developed on OpenStack, containers, APIs and fabric. Companies that pursued public cloud in 2015, but ran into unexpected costs, application re-writes or security concerns, will take a fresh look at private cloud in 2016.

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About the Authors 

Kieran Harty, Kieran is the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Tintri.  Prior to becoming CTO, Kieran served as CEO and Chairman of Tintri. Before founding Tintri, he was Executive Vice President of R&D at VMware for seven years, where he was responsible for all products. He led the delivery of the first and subsequent releases of ESX Server, Virtual Center and VMware's desktop products. Before VMware, he was Vice President of R&D at Visigenic/Borland and Chief Scientist at TIBCO. Kieran has a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and a Master's Degree in Computer Science from Trinity College Dublin.