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.

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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.