Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2024. Read them in this 16th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Trends in Data Storage, AI and Virtual Desktops
By Jimmy Tam, CEO
of Peer Software
As 2023 comes to a close, Peer Software
highlights its top predictions on the implications of AI in the data storage
industry and the evolution of Virtual desktops. Below are Peer Software's
predictions for 2024.
The
storage industry will start to productize AI and ML
AI and Machine Learning have so much promise,
but they're not being adopted as quickly as anyone in the industry anticipated.
There's a clear reason why: users simply don't know how to realize the
technologies' full potential. Beyond ChatGPT, which is easy to use and
incredibly popular, there's no real out-of-the-box product for enterprise
storage customers. So unless organizations have a data scientist on hand to
help them navigate the intricacies of AI and ML, they're very likely to hold
off when it comes to implementing any kind of solution.
This presents a great opportunity for the
storage industry and the smart companies are already starting to think about
it. Through 2024, we'll see the beginning of the productization of AI and ML.
Ready-to-use packages will be developed so that users can easily understand
what the technologies can help them achieve, while being straightforward to set
up and run. Then watch, as AI and ML adoption increases.
Active-Passive High Availability Practices Evolve -
Active-Active Has its Moment
Without continuous
availability and real-time access to data, businesses risk losing out to
competitors, making decisions with inaccurate information, and more. So it is
no wonder that CIOs are starting to demand more from their data centers. In the
coming 12 months, it is likely that many IT leaders will start to adopt
active-active capabilities, improving performance by distributing the workload
across several nodes to allow access to the resources of all servers.
By moving away from
active-passive technologies that simply don't make the most of the available
servers and often require manual intervention during outages, CIOs will ensure
that data is actionable wherever it resides, is as close as possible to the end-user
for performance, and that the load of data processing is spread across all
compute and storage nodes whether it be at the edge, in the data center, or in
the cloud.
Virtual
Desktop Infrastructure is here to stay - but much will move back on-premise
When the pandemic hit in 2020, VDIs were the
reason many of us could continue to work. They offered users a flexible,
consistent experience from wherever they logged in and became a lynchpin for
organizations during the days of lockdown. But there was an issue: the hardware
was difficult to get hold of. And the urgency we all became so used to during
the pandemic meant there was no time to wait for the supply chain to right
itself, so CIOs turned to the cloud.
Don't get me wrong, the cloud has clear
benefits. It is easy to implement, and it is elastic in nature, quickly
responding to and growing with our needs. But it can be very expensive and,
because cloud providers tend to charge for each transaction, costs can be
difficult to predict.
Availability in the supply chain will bring
about a shift towards migrating highly transactional workloads back on-premise.
Unhappy with writing blank checks, CFOs will
rightly start to ask CIOs to demonstrate ROI and explain the cost difference
between cloud and on-premise.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jimmy
Tam is the CEO of Peer Software, a global software company focused on
simplifying file management and orchestration for enterprise organizations
since 1993. Jimmy is a 25-year veteran of enterprise software solutions and
works with customers and partners daily on architecture, planning, and design
of IT infrastructure solutions that meet the complex demands of data storage,
access, protection, and sharing across distributed employees, partner firms,
and customers.