Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2021. Read them in this 13th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Rethinking Cloud, AI, and Healthcare
By Renen Hallak, is Founder and CEO at VAST Data
It has been a turbulent year for companies and
industries of all kinds as they've rapidly had to adapt to the new normal of
COVID-19, from the way teams work together to how organizations engage with
customers to advancing critical research in the fight against the virus.
At the heart of these efforts has been the
increasingly growing value of data, and the amount of it. But datasets are only
as good as the way you manage and scale them to drive innovation, whether
that's for enhanced AI, or discoveries and breakthroughs in life sciences and
healthcare.
Regardless, the ripple effects of COVID-19 and
the general evolution of emerging technologies have taught entire industries
valuable lessons that are sure to be implemented in 2021 and beyond.
The Cloud
Tax Triggers the Cloud Tea Party
Companies that began their cloud journeys four to
five years ago are now refactoring their strategies. The multi-year agreements
customers made have now begun to mature, and as organizations weigh their
alternatives, 2021 will be a reconciliation against the tax that cloud vendors
level against customers versus being able to build on-premise.
Many cloud vendors have held the line on pricing
during periods of extreme HW cost reductions (example: Amazon S3) such that the
initial economic calculus no longer works. In 2021, customers who operate at
scale will make bold moves back on-prem as they have now realized that shifting
costs between OPEX and CAPEX results in the same total spend.
And, while time is money and cloud provides agility,
money is also money. When the comparable costs are 15x-30x more than what
customers pay on-prem, the economics can't be ignored.
Legacy NAS
is Dead for AI
With the introduction of PCIe Gen4, I/O rates have
now completely broken away from CPU core evolutions. Legacy NFS providers are
stuck with single-stream TCP that is rate-limited by the capability of a single
CPU core on the application server. PCIe Gen4 will double the peak I/O
performance of applications in 2021, while a CPU core will no longer be able to
equally double single-core I/O performance.
There is no greater concentration of single-host IO
than in the AI market - for applications such as machine learning and deep
learning. To resolve this, customers will seek solutions that support
multi-threading, RDMA, and the ability to bypass CPUs altogether - as is the
case with NVIDIA's GPUDirect Storage. The demands to keep GPUs and AI
Processors fed and efficient will dramatically outstrip the I/O capabilities of
legacy TCP-based NAS, leading customers to walk away from legacy NAS altogether
in 2021.
Standards
Become Even More Important in 2021 for ML/AI
AI compute vendors will further push to homogenize
standards across the market to make way for framework compatibility. In their
quest to open up the TAM for accelerated computing, the need for standard
programming environments and I/O stacks will only increase.
The explosion of ML/AI-tuned silicon will force the
industry to adopt a standardized storage presentation to a common hardware
environment. Storage-wise, while NAS has an appeal as NFS is also a standard,
standard NFS optimizations in the kernel such as RDMA and multi-path will be
table stakes to marry the performance needs with the push to standardize.
The
Healthcare Industry Walks Away from the Hard Drive
Healthcare will be the first industry to go all-in on
flash, moving away completely from traditional tiered storage. They learned a
hard lesson this year as they raced for the researching, testing,
manufacturing, vaccinating, deployment, and calculating answers that the world
needed.
The problems with tiered storage show up most
prominently at scale with analytics. These critical data sets now have a value
that is proportionate to their size, which throws the value of storage tiering
out the window. 2020 proved that our front-line systems could not deal with the
latency of mechanical media, and low-cost flash price points are now compelling
enough that organizations no longer need to choose between performance and
budget.
A Modernized
2021 and Beyond
With the pandemic continuing into 2021, the next 12
months will again provide uncertainty for many organizations. But companies and
entire industries continue to make the necessary investments in the
modernization of their infrastructure and core technologies - much of which
comes from lessons learned in 2020. As they do so, they will be more suited to
not only handle any turbulent months ahead but will set themselves up to be
innovators in their field for years to come.
##
About the Author

Renen Hallak, is Founder and CEO at VAST Data. Prior to founding VAST, Renen led the
architecture and development of an all flash array at XtremIO, from inception
to over a billion dollars in revenue while acting as VP R&D and leading a
team of over 200 engineers.