
Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019. Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Irshad Raihan, director, storage product marketing, Red Hat
Container Storage, Hyperconvergence and Object Storage will Fuel Enterprise Innovation for a Growing Data Economy
In 2019, storage will go big--but it will also
go small.
Growing storage demands, driven by big data
realities and the hybrid cloud, will drive the need for object storage and
hyperconverged infrastructure. Simultaneously, the move toward microservices
and developing applications within Linux containers will create a greater need
for container-native storage, tightly integrated into Kubernetes platforms.
Here's how I see it all playing out.
Prediction
1: Container storage for stateful applications and microservices will continue
to mature as Kubernetes tightens its grip as the standard for container orchestration.
The Kubernetes ecosystem continues to evolve
rapidly, and we'll see greater focus around providing a consistent storage
experience for enterprises looking to deploy container workloads across cloud
boundaries, driven by the convergence of hybrid cloud and container
technologies.
Modern enterprises deploy applications in a
variety of locations, including on-premises on physical servers or virtual
machines (VMs), in the public cloud on VMs, or in containers on-premises or in the public cloud. Organizations
will need unified storage and data platforms that can provide data portability
and storage that works across all of these very different and distributed
environments.
As a microcosm of the broader move toward AIOps
(Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations) and data center automation, we'll
see much innovation around automated container storage management that can
enable developers to more easily provision storage through Kubernetes,
essentially bypassing the need to make requests through traditional storage
administrators.
Prediction
2: Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) will start to become the default.
The growth of hyperconverged infrastructure
(HCI) will be reflective of a larger trend around the growing relevance of IT
generalists.
The days of operating in silos are quickly
coming to an end. Pureplay HCI solutions will bow to solutions that merge HCI
and cloud-native technologies to offer flexibility to customers in
infrastructure planning and managing capacity as an operating expense.
Meanwhile, appliance-centric architectures will
give way to flexible, software-defined models that can support expanding use
cases at the edge, as enterprises start to think about the edge as an extension
of their hybrid cloud strategy. This will happen across both the public and
private sectors as organizations become increasingly reliant upon data to plan
military operations, collect information from sensors, perform energy analyses,
and more.
Prediction
3: Object storage will become a primary tier storage option for today's data
economy.
2019 will see object storage move beyond backup
and archiving to being the ultimate big data, AI, and machine learning storage
support solution. Object storage will continue to mature and shift from second
tier storage to a first tier storage option. In some cases, we'll see
enterprises moving to object storage for cost efficiencies.
A key forcing function will be data gravity -
the attraction that data has to applications and services, especially in the
cloud. Driven by the demands of today's data economy, object storage will expand to
accommodate many more uses cases: autonomous vehicles, digital cities, customer
analytics, and more. It will be increasingly adopted by a wide variety of
industries, led by financial services and retail.
Conclusion:
Time to move to the next phase of storage.
Last year was all
about moving on from and breaking free of legacy storage infrastructures. 2019
will be about building upon that movement. In 2019, I see storage becoming an
integrated part of the enterprise--directly entwined with all aspects of IT,
including hybrid cloud infrastructure, cloud-native application development,
enterprise integration, and more. From big data to microservices, on-premises
to the cloud, and into the new data economy, storage can help enterprises
become more agile, flexible, and, above all, smarter.
##
About the
Author
Irshad Raihan is director of Storage
Product Marketing at Red
Hat, responsible for strategy, thought
leadership, and Go-To-Market execution. Previously, he held senior product
marketing and product management positions at HPE and IBM for Big Data and Data
Management products. Irshad holds an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University and a
Masters in Computer Science from Clemson University. He is based in Northern
California and can be reached on Twitter @irshadraihan.