Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022. Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
The Changing Tide of Technology Trends
By Eran Kirzner, CEO, Lightbits
Labs
The adoption of cloud solutions has become the order of the day, with
cloud-based operations becoming standard operating procedure for many
organizations. This shift in how organizations do their day to day work is
having a ripple effect in the technology industry.
Technology consumption model
One such effect is around the consumption model of IT infrastructure.
Whereas previously acquiring computing and storage resources required large up
front investments, one of the most significant shifts stemming from the
cloud-first approach has been the normalization of the ‘Pay-as-you-use'
consumption model. This model makes CapEx and OpEx budgeting more accurate and
ties infrastructure investment to business imperatives. It is prevalent in the
public cloud and is also filtering through to the private cloud since it
provides better internal budgeting and resource allocation regardless of who
owns the computing resources, the organization or an external cloud provider.
Storage In a Cloud World
Most SSD vendors have begun migrating to PCIe 4 as the storage device
bus of choice. However, the transition to PCIe 5 will take place faster when
compared to the adoption of previous PCIe generations. This can partly be
attributed to the significant increases in bandwidth, gigatransfer, power
consumption (less lanes), the ecosystem pushing towards it, and frequency
offered by this fifth-generation technology. While PCI 5 is expected only to
start rolling out over the coming months, the expectation is that it will
become the de facto standard before too long, given the importance of storage
in a cloud-first world.
This will extend to the hyperscale space as hyperscalers start building
their own set of SSD technologies, some already do. Hyperscalers are seeking to
accelerate specific applications in their environments while also providing
much-needed differentiation and cost reduction options to organizations.
QLC (quad-level) flash is also expected to gain market share as Cloud
Service Providers (CSPs) diversify their supply chains and optimize costs.
These drives store four bits per flash cell, increasing storage density by
nearly twenty-five percent and bringing the concept of an all-flash data center
a step closer to fruition. The right software-defined storage (SDS) solution
can provide an additional benefit for CSPs leveraging QLC technology by
maximizing the endurance of QLC by as much as 20X while offering similar
performance and durability results as using TLC-based SSDs.
In the NIC of time
Building from here, and the importance of both storage and network
infrastructure in the connected landscape, is the emergence of the SmartNIC
ecosystem, also known as Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU) or Data
Processing Unit (DPU). Think of these smart NICs as the fusion of wired
networking and computational resources on the same card. Essentially, these are
programmable NICs that offload performance-critical or security-conscious
processing from the main CPUs. Most hyperscalers will adopt these in some
capacity, with Tier 2 providers and Webscalers following suit in two to three
years.
Remember remember
On the memory side, CXL (Compute Express Link) technology will gain a
significant foothold in both the volatile and persistent memory subsystems.
This open standard for high-speed CPU to device and CPU to memory will
accelerate the performance of next-generation data centers, an absolute
imperative for meeting the increasingly sophisticated analytical and processing
requirements of organizations across industry verticals.
Shifting disaggregating
perspectives
Disaggregating storage through the rapid growth of the NVMe/TCP
ecosystem will become more significant as the shift to the cloud continues. The
high speed and low latency at which NVMe/TCP provides access to data are
ideally suited to private, public, and edge clouds. An essential ingredient for
IT modernization and simplification will involve eliminating traditional
infrastructure silos and transitioning to a more cloud-like , scalable
infrastructure that will incorporate NVMe/TCP and SDS for distributed, disaggregated
architectures that can improve performance and scalability while lowering
costs.
Additionally, software-defined storage will gain more
momentum. Software as everything will become the norm, whether it is storage
(SDS), networking (smart NICs), or infrastructure (Infrastructure-as-Code). The
battle for innovation will continue shifting from the hardware to the software
space as companies rely on SDS to enable hybrid cloud, disaggregated, and
composable storage architectures.
Storage will simply become another application to manipulate in the
broader technology ecosystem. It is no longer about using specialized hardware
and more about cost-efficient solutions that can be easily consumed at scale
without disruption to existing processes. Of course, being able to make the
best use of the hardware is key for high-performance storage and clouds in
general.
Finally, ongoing supply chain restrictions will push companies to adopt
technologies that better utilize their existing infrastructure. This will feed
the market for software-defined-everything as it allows organizations to
achieve new levels of efficiency while maximizing their existing technology
investments and continuing the relentless shift to cloud way of doing business.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eran Kirzner is the founder and CEO of Lightbits Labs. Lightbits has raised more than $55 million from marquee strategic investors including DellEMC, Cisco, Micron and with investments from Chairman and Founder Avigdor Willenz. Prior to Lightbits, Eran worked for PMC-Sierra, Wintegra and Freescale in various storage, compute and data communications roles. He holds patents in communication, QOS, processors architecture, flash, media-management and storage systems. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer and electrical engineering from the Universitat Ben Gurion Ba-Negev and Tel Aviv University, respectively.