Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022. Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
The Data Landscape at the Edge, Through the Looking Glass
By Bruce Kornfeld, CMPO, StorMagic
In 2021, the global pandemic continued its impact on the IT landscape, driving organizations to further emphasize focus and budget on upleveling their edge computing strategies – a must for many given remote and widespread workforce arrangements. As data continues to explode at the edge, where it’s being generated and processed, edge storage initiatives will remain a key priority for CTOs, CIOs and IT directors everywhere. With this in mind, let’s explore some of the main themes we can expect to see in 2022, related to edge data storage and cost control.
A few of my predictions for 2022 are outlined below:
- Stronger observability and monitoring (OTM) for edge computing become a requirement to better automate IT department needs. For instance, Artificial Intelligence Operations (AIOps) can be used to analyze the health of all components of an edge system and proactively predict where failures might occur, and thus able to warn IT teams to take action before an outage happens.
- Alternatives to “cloud-first” strategies emerge. In many cases, data needs to be processed at the edge due to performance or cost, and sending all data to the cloud isn’t needed anymore. Advances in edge computing will enable huge amounts of data to be processed in real-time, and send only the most relevant data to the cloud.
- Retail, especially the restaurant vertical, will expand to include edge-based analytics to help better control front of and back of house costs in real-time or “Retail Predictive Analytics.”
- Secure, isolated air-gapped disaster recovery (DR) solutions gain popularity. Maintaining security between the primary datacenter and edge will remain a priority in 2022. Important data can be moved offline so that it can’t be accessed by “bad actors” but still made available for searching and using quickly, as needed.
- HCI deployments at the edge become even smaller. It’s no secret that there is usually a lack of space, budget, and dedicated IT resources at edge sites. Two-node HCI clusters have already become the standard to control hardware costs, particularly for companies with hundreds or thousands of locations (when compared to three-node). Next year, very powerful and even smaller form-factor servers will be introduced and gain popularity to simplify and reduce costs at small sites around the world.
We are in one of the most interesting times in history for an overhaul of traditional IT processes, a trajectory moving further away from the primary datacenter and to the edge where most of today’s data is created, managed, and processed. Sophisticated software will pave the way as customers continue their ongoing quest to find the best methods to handle the massive amounts of data being generated at the edge. Where do we store all of it? How should we process it? Expect an uptick in the use of strategies like KVM, containers, and OTM to address these dilemmas in 2022.
What changes do you envision for IT in 2022? Follow us, @StorMagic, on Twitter to share your vision and continue the discussion.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bruce Kornfeld is an experienced technology executive who has held leadership roles in marketing, product management, alliances and business development in the storage, server, networking and software industries. He joined StorMagic in 2017, and serves as chief marketing and product officer, where he is responsible for all aspects of global marketing, product management and alliances for the company. Prior to joining StorMagic, Bruce held marketing and product leadership positions at Compellent, Dell and NCR. He helped Compellent grow its revenue from $9M to more than $150M, which led to their IPO and eventual sale to Dell for $960M, and was instrumental in building and growing Dell’s first storage division to over $1bn. Follow him on Twitter @brucekornfeld.
