Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2020. Read them in this 12th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Paul Speciale, Chief Product Officer, Scality
Storage Lives on the Edge
The year 2020 will continue to see both the evolution and
advancement of the storage industry with the cloud, edge computing and digital
transformation being top of mind. As
organizations tackle these changes, storage decentralization and multi-protocol
systems will be adopted and a significant focus in the year ahead.
Object storage at the edge will be on Flash:
Object storage will move into the edge, for applications
that capture large data streams from a wide variety of mobile, IoT and other
connected devices. This will include event streams and logs, sensor and device
data, vehicle drive data, image and video media data and more, with high data
rates and high concurrency from thousands or more simultaneous data streams.
These applications will be developed for cloud native deployment, and will
therefore naturally embrace RESTful object style storage protocols - making
object storage on flash media an optimal choice on the edge to support this
emerging class of data-centric applications.
Multi-Cloud Unification:
Data storage will become massively decentralized, as enterprises
leverage a combination of on-premises and public cloud IT resources. This will
create a need for a unified namespace and control plane to simplify data
visibility and access. Moreover, corporations will use a variety of public
clouds, each one selected to help solve specific business problems, thereby
creating a multi-cloud data management problem. In addition, the emergence of
edge computing will further drive decentralization as corporations choose to
deploy IT resources "near" the edge devices they manage. These trends all help
to create a new and extreme "cloud data silos" scenario, that can only be
addressed by solutions that provide global data visibility across these
distributed clouds and data centers.
Digital Transformation / Multi-Protocol:
Multi-Protocol systems will be embraced during digital
transformation: Customers transforming from legacy applications to cloud native
applications will continue to embrace RESTful protocols as their standard
mechanism for accessing data storage services and systems. Systems that are
multi-protocol (legacy protocols such as NFS and SMB for file access plus new
RESTful APIs such as AWS S3 and Azure Blob Storage for object style access)
will be adopted to help companies transition during this phase. Moreover,
object storage services and systems will become a standard solution for
stateful container storage.
Infrastructure application will be deployed on
Kubernetes, including storage:
Kubernetes will be the default platform for infrastructure
deployment in the data center: as enterprises transform and adopt cloud-native
applications, the need for a standard deployment and orchestration framework
for containers will increase, just as it did during the Virtual Machine (VM)
wave over the course of the last two decades. Kubernetes will be that standard
orchestration platform, not only for applications deployed in containers, but
also for infrastructure elements built as services and microservices. This will
extend to data storage and data management infrastructure deployed on
Kubernetes.
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About the Author
Paul Speciale leads Product Management for
Scality, where he is responsible for defining RING functionality, solutions and
roadmaps. Before Scality, he was fortunate to have been part of several
exciting cloud computing and early-stage storage companies, including Appcara,
where he was focused on cloud application automation solutions; Q-layer, one of
the first cloud orchestration companies (the last company acquired by Sun
Microsystems); and Savvis, where he led the launch of the Savvis VPDC cloud
service. In the storage space, Paul was VP of Products for Amplidata focused on
object storage, and Agami Systems, building scalable, high-performance NAS
solutions. Paul has over 20 years of industry experience that spans both
Fortune 500 companies such as IBM (twice) and Oracle, as well as venture-funded
startups, and has been a speaker and panelist at many industry conferences.