Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022. Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Growth in Computational, Edge and On-prem Storage
By Hao Zhong, co-founder and CEO of ScaleFlux
We have seen much in the way of innovations in storage over the past year – here is where I see storage (and enterprise technology as a whole) going in 2022:
Computational Storage Becomes Commonplace
Over the past year Computational Storage has become the ultimate choice for enterprise organizations and in the cloud. And the more companies are developing relevant products around it the faster Computational Storage becomes adopted across a wide range of applications and industries. Computational Storage will reach the tipping point in the coming years due to its being so well positioned to help enterprise and edge infrastructure to accomplish more powerful data analytics at a lower cost.
Consolidation in the Chip Industry Will Sabotage Innovation
The reality is that due to years of aggressive M&A in the microchip industry there are only a few companies left, Broadcom, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, and a few others. Consolidation has made that industry very small compared to what it used to be and is potentially killing further innovation. I predict the market will need more innovative start-ups to infuse the ecosystem.
IT Leaders with Cross-Domain Knowledge Become Indispensable
We will see more hardware and software co-design which will require IT leaders with cross-domain knowledge. Software-defined ruled the last decade leading to a trend of IT wanting to decouple software and hardware deployment. But this has slowed due to the pandemic, we just cannot have the luxury of doing everything software defined. That is why there will be increasing intelligence needed between IT infrastructure and the data center to work closely, requiring further optimization between hardware and software. IT leaders will need to know how to co-design, manage, and optimize this.
Edge Computing Will Grow
There will be an increase in demand for edge computing. This increase is being fed by the need to power a growing number of base stations, the fixed transceivers that serve as the main communication point for mobile technology as 5G (and even 6G) grow in popularity. Also, as the number of self-driving cars increases, so does the need for local storage, as well as growth in remote processing power in the car itself. Edge will lead infrastructure and even cloud growth in the coming year.
On-prem Storage Increases in Importance
As data grows–both in size and importance–on-premises storage use will expand in parallel, growing into indispensable infrastructure for a variety of reasons including, security, performance, regulation, cost, and latency. On-premises storage will serve all these critical needs, while the cold and warm storage move to cloud. And we will see continuous progress and innovation in the segment of on-prem computing and storage, as well as with innovation on the edge driven by the need for 5G base stations, autonomous driving, and its associated costs. It will be impossible to store all this data in the cloud.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Hao Zhong is a passionate technology innovator and entrepreneur who has been contributing cutting-edge technology and products in the data storage and computing industry for years. Hao is presently the co-founder and CEO of ScaleFlux, which is leading the computational storage subsystem development in the industry.
