Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019.  Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Shirish Phatak, Founder and CEO of Talon

As data grows, so will the need for software-defined solutions

For most industries, a few petabytes of data storage is enough to handle its organization’s data, such as using datacenters or cloud storage platforms and smaller scale servers in isolated locations. However, it has been predicted that almost a zettabyte of storage will be transferred, shared, and consumed over telecom networks within the next few years. That’s only the data being transmitted over networks and does not include data center storage. Such an immense amount of data will only increase exponentially as practices such as augmented and virtual reality become more common and organizations leverage drone video footage for the purpose of surveying and project planning.

While video and visual media already make up a large part of network traffic and data storage, storing and transferring 360° video places an incredibly high demand on all hardware involved. Data centers will need 10-20x their current amount of storage to accommodate these new file sets, depending on resolution, compression, equipment, and other factors. While the impact of virtual and augmented reality on global industries will be immense, enterprises will need to significantly upgrade their existing hardware and storage solutions to be able to accommodate these new forms of this type of visual experience.

Being able to leverage hyperscaler platforms such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon AWS, hyper-converged infrastructure and software-defined storage solutions, with built-in intelligence around data retention, data analytics and GPU processing power, will be key to supply for the rapid growth of structured and unstructured data for these organizations, while factoring in the ability to tame and control that footprint.

##

About the Author

Shirish Phatak is the Founder and CEO of Talon. Shirish has almost two decades of experience in building scalable, high performance systems that solve mission critical information technology challenges.

Shirish was Chairman of the Board and Co-founder of Velocius Networks, a creator of network performance management solutions. Shirish was instrumental in the technical direction, enterprise requirements and vision leading to an acquisition by Akamai (AKAM) in 2013. Shirish also co-founded Tacit Networks, a pioneer in Wide Area File Services (WAFS) solutions that was sold to Packeteer (PKTR), later sold to Bluecoat.

Shirish earned an M.Tech in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai and an M.Phil in Computer Science from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.