Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2018.  Read them in this 10th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Irshad Raihan, senior manager, Product Marketing, Red Hat Storage

Increased decoupling of applications from infrastructure, and deeper investment in telcos, IoT

2018 will bring some important changes in the way enterprises manage infrastructure and applications. Open source technology will continue to provide the building blocks for modern data center and development teams. Here are five predictions from our vantage point.

Prediction #1: Acceleration of Linux containers as the next generation compute platform

Kubernetes will cement its leadership position as an ideal orchestration framework, not just for containers, but also for infrastructure and virtual machine-based workloads. Kubernetes will also play a role in the move to serverless computing, which will continue to gain momentum in 2018 with Kubernetes-based open source vendors in the data center. Consequently, enterprise customers will increasingly look for storage solutions that are software-defined and highly integrated with their Kubernetes orchestration frameworks.

Prediction #2: Massive investment in software-defined storage by telcos re-architecting networks for 5G and Narrowband IoT

Legacy storage technologies put telcos at risk of not being able to support new business models and workloads driven by the fundamental shifts happening in that industry. In 2018, telcos will explore the relevance of edge technologies in the data center, and vice versa, driving greater investment in OpenStack (estimated at $6 billion by 2020). As many emerging markets leapfrog from outdated connectivity methods to mobile connectivity and eSIMs, telcos will turn to elastic storage solutions to build their new infrastructures to serve those segments.

Prediction #3: The end of point-play hyperconverged solutions

In 2018, enterprise customers will look for even more cost-effective and efficient ways to consolidate and manage their infrastructure using software-defined technologies as we approach the next wave of hyperconvergence, beyond VDI use cases. All-flash and NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) will continue to become standard features in hyperconverged storage solutions, as will hyperconvergence itself become a standard feature of all data center infrastructures in the coming years. More importantly, customers will start to move away from single point-play hyperconverged solutions to trusted advisors with a broader portfolio and long term vision.

Prediction #4: Big Data and the IoT will continue to lay the foundation for machine learning and artificial intelligence.

As the scrutiny around public cloud lock-in and data privacy intensifies, enterprises will start to consider private cloud options for extreme data-intensive workloads to manage analytics sprawl. Many will look toward large scale object storage solutions to support their need for configuration flexibility, faster insights, savings from optimized compute/storage procurement, and control over data. Public cloud customers will demand public cloud-like convenience from private cloud providers, triggering a resurgence of OpenStack.

Prediction #5: Mainstream adoption of software-defined storage

If a developer dreamed up storage it would closely resemble SDS (software-defined storage). SDS supports the underlying principles behind composable infrastructure that allows resources to be logically abstracted and pooled to enable faster IT reflexes. For instance, SDS empowers DevOps teams to deploy applications on highly decoupled infrastructure building blocks for rapid and continuous application delivery.

There remains trepidation around the upfront procurement, deployment, and tuning complexity required to get SDS into production. However, there is much data to support the claim that 2018 will be the year when SDS breaks out of do-it-yourself mode into a mainstream solution deployed in minutes, not days or weeks.

Conclusion: Investment in open source technologies that help decouple infrastructure tiers will enable greater business flexibility.

In 2018 we will continue to see organizations demand more scalable and adaptable storage options that allow companies to break from the bonds of legacy infrastructure. The growing acceptance of edge technologies and spurt of data intensive workloads -- along with the desire for faster and more flexible application development -- will drive enterprises further toward containers, SDS, and open source technologies. As such, the momentum that each of those achieved in 2017 will continue well into the new year.

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About the Author

Irshad runs the product marketing team at Red Hat Storage. Previously, he held senior product marketing and product management positions at HP and IBM covering big data and data management products. Irshad holds a Masters in Computer Science from Clemson University, and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University. He is based in Northern California and can be reached on Twitter @irshadraihan.