Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2024. Read them in this 16th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
The Rise of VMware Alternatives, the Fall of the Cloud & More
By Bruce Kornfeld, chief marketing and product officer, StorMagic
As the global data explosion continues to soar, edge computing remains at the forefront of every IT department. Meanwhile, those same IT departments will be changing what, why and how they purchase and deploy IT solutions, and will continue to find less expensive, easier to manage solutions in the coming year.
As a result, there are several key predictions StorMagic envisions for the 2024 IT landscape:
1. Customers demand alternatives to VMware.
With the convergence of Broadcom and VMware we’ve all been waiting for, finally in the rearview mirror, customers will seek better, cheaper alternatives to VMware vSAN and vSphere. While vSAN is an ideal solution for large enterprise datacenter, its rich feature set drives up the cost. As more and more data continues to be processed where it’s generated – at the edge – the bill for vSAN licenses deployed at dozens, hundreds or thousands of sites simply cannot meet budgets. A marked increased adoption rate for vSphere hypervisor alternatives, like Microsoft Hyper-V and KVM, will boom in response.
2. Companies deal with the ramifications of “cloud regret.”
Many organizations that jumped into the hype of cloud will struggle with the downside of moving all IT to the cloud. The cost of cloud services is a real problem – not only is it expensive to move workloads to the cloud – cloud computing providers constantly change the cost of their services mid-contract. Other problems with cloud computing will force many customers to move their compute and storage closer to where data is being created – the edge.
3. “Cloud regret” leads to more private cloud deployments.
The pendulum is swinging back from centralized to distributed (just like when the “mainframe era” was taken over by client-server. Many cloud computing use cases are starting to move to edge computing. Servers continue to improve every year in both performance rates and density – modern servers now come in the smallest form factor ever seen and include high storage capacities – 30TB and more using modern technologies like NVMe. Establishing a private cloud has become much easier, and ensures customers’ control – and trust – can remain onsite. Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware will lead to a rise of non-VMWare hypervisors like KVM and Microsoft Hyper-V to help users build their private clouds. In response, we can expect to see performance improvements in these competing hypervisor solutions as they race to meet – and eventually exceed – VMware vSphere’s leading performance and scalability.
4. Geopolitical upheaval shifts buying patterns.
StorMagic has seen a trend over the last few years where customers prefer to lean on channel partners and integrators to buy complete solutions, versus individual “pieces” directly from multiple vendors. This streamlines the purchasing and procurement process. StorMagic believes that managed service providers (MSPs) will increase in popularity as customers also wish to alleviate the headaches tied to the current geopolitical environment; the associated delays caused by overseas supply chains and IT manufacturers will have to be outsmarted. MSPs will provide a helping hand with automatic rollout of environments with many sites (think 200+ sites managing 6,000 HCI clusters).
5. High availability (HA) requirements skyrocket.
Tolerance for downtime is a thing of the past. More whiz-bang features will continue to be introduced ubiquitously, and the need for 100% uptime will become just short of critical. One example use case that will demand HA is video surveillance storage for retail stores and in public transportation vehicles. The data captured in these areas is important for facial recognition to help solve crimes. IT video surveillance solutions will continue to improve in regard to HA and storage capacity to match increasing market demands.
2024 will be a year of continued momentum of IT shifts that have already begun. These will focus on continued growth away from the cloud and to the edge, more consolidated purchasing patterns due to supply chain delays overseas and the persistent intolerance for downtime. We look forward to watching these spaces in the year ahead.
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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 security 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.
