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

Contributed by Clayton Weise, cloud architect at Key Information Systems

4 data center predictions for 2016

When it's time to think about a new year, I always look back on the year that was. The past 12 months have seen remarkable achievements in enterprise IT and even greater technology developments. As we head into 2016, here are four trends we expect will impact enterprise IT and the companies they support:

More storage innovation is expected

The changes for enterprise IT, like they did in 2015, will come quickly in 2016. Flash's continued rise in the data center, driven by decreasing pricing and maturing compression technology, will also be a trend. Hybrid data centers, however, will emerge as the norm since flash isn't the right fit for every workload. Persistent random-access memory (RAM) will move into the enterprise space, taking over critical workloads for some companies, as the technology has the potential to disrupt computing and storage significantly. However, the changes won't just be about new technology. Tape will continue to be part of the modern data center, despite its decline.

OpenStack matures through wider adoption

Walmart's public documentation of its adoption and ongoing work with OpenStack is just one example of a major corporation helping to make the technology's use easier for everyone else to eventually consider and implement. Like other open-source technology, OpenStack's maturation can't come until it experiences greater adoption and more actionable use cases across varies enterprises and industries. OpenStack has started down this road but there are still some hurdles in the way of complexity and deployment challenges. In the next 12 months, we expect more and more companies to start to consider and test with OpenStack and we'll see adoption start to pick up.

DRaaS becomes the norm

Disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity have always been seen as critical to the success of a business, but many companies struggle to manage them properly. Building, maintaining and testing a secondary physical data center isn't an easy proposition. Not only is it expensive, but it also takes a tremendous amount of time, energy and resources. The cloud has provided an easier path and eliminated these barriers; companies no longer have to live with the risk of not having an effective DR plan in place. Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) is the answer. DRaaS has moved hybrid cloud models past the development and testing ground. CIOs and enterprises want the cloud's economics and significant bandwidth, as well as the compute and storage that it boasts. Public cloud, however, can't match the enterprise service-level agreements (SLAs) companies need to know their data is secure, available and appropriately backed up. DRaaS saves companies money and provides the level of DR they need with increased flexibility.

Hyperconverged infrastructure grows rapidly

The all-in-one, software-centric architecture offered by hyperconverged infrastructures will see a significant increase in adoption. IT departments are attracted to the tight integration and control over compute, storage, networking and virtualization that comes with the software-centric approach. Hyperconvergence helps dispel the server, storage and networking siloes that are all too common in enterprise IT, and they will fade in favor of greater flexibility. Auto clustering and additional nodes mean access to more modern data center features and faster, less expensive scaling. The trend also comes with the growth of containers, which is a positive development for companies that want to integrate hyperconverged infrastructure. The eventual pairing of hyperconvergence with containers will begin the process of bringing increased mobility, agility and scale to the enterprise.

IT is always going to be an area of great innovation. It has to be to support shifting processes and methodologies in the enterprise. Business moves quickly in 2015. It's going to get even faster in 2016, and IT's changes in the coming year will be all about making enterprise IT faster, less expensive and perfectly equipped for the digital economy.

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About the Author

Clayton Weise is a cloud architect at Key Information Systems, where he is responsible for designing, architecting, and implementing cloud solutions, managing production workloads and leveraging cloud resources in disaster recovery, clustering and hybrid (cloud and on-premise) infrastructure solutions.