2015 Predictions by Six Companies

Kevin Linsell, head of service development, Adapt Services Ltd, said:

1. “Contactless Payments. In retail, the adoption of contactless payment methods has increased over recent years for low value items. With ApplePay launching in the USA, I would expect an UK launch to follow in the first half of 2015. Retailers looking to appeal to the Apple demographic need to prepare themselves to support this new transaction process.
2. Tightening regulation and increased security concerns. In 2013 and 2014 security breaches, vulnerabilities and revelations around security were not only common headlines but also serious issues for many businesses. I don’t see that changing in 2015, but what may change is ever increasing regulation and controls to mitigate the impact and return some control to the EU. Some of these changes, such as the revised EU Data Protection Regulation are fast becoming law and the impacts, such as the ‘Right to be Forgotten’, can be assessed by an organisation. There are other regulations that industries need to prepare for, such as working towards Solvency II ahead of it coming into effect in 2016 in the Insurance sector.
3. Wearable tech starts to go mainstream. This has been hyped for some time now and up until recently the most headline grabbing product, Google Glass, was more often in the news for negative reasons than positive. Apple may change all this once the Apple Watch becomes available in Q1 2015. The current products from Pebble, Samsung, Sony etc. will continue to evolve and compete, but the Apple product is likely to bring this mainstream. From a CIO perspective, this will have impact from an internal security perspective as another form of BYOD. And if you have an online presence, it may require a further investment in development. Think back 15 years where everyone was developing online stores and eCommerce sites, then in the last 5 years the development of mobile apps. Will it soon be a requirement to have a wearable based app also?”

David Fisk, sales director EMEA, Quorum Labs, Inc., said:
“2015 will be an important year for businesses as they look to the cloud to fulfill their DR needs. DR as a Service offers a flexible platform that uniquely empowers businesses to resume operations seamlessly in the event of a disaster-rather than simply recovering data-and achieve incredible value even in the absence of a disaster or data interruption event. Moreover, advances in DRaaS have enabled an industry-first: the ability for businesses to decide the level of protection at a server level; mission-critical servers can be set to recover instantly while other servers with less critical data might be set to recover at a longer RTO, creating incredible cost efficiency. Because DRaaS is easy to deploy and manage when compared with traditional non-cloud DR solutions, we can expect to see a rapid increase in adoption, particularly in the mid-market. There is also speculation that some traditional vendors are collaborating to provide a DRaaS solution by end of 2015. As demand for next-generation cloud-based BC solutions accelerates, the channel is well-positioned to benefit from an explosion of lucrative opportunities. Still, it will be critical for the channel and vendors alike to educate customers on the power of cloud-based DR solutions.”

Steven Luong, endpoint and applications expert, CommVault Systems, In c., said:
“There’s much to look forward to in the New Year, including; a desire for endpoint protection that goes above and beyond protection inside your organisation’s four walls, an increased emphasis on analytics, and pressure to calm the growing BYOA storm.

Here is a look at three predictions we have for 2015:

Analytics and reporting will grow in importance – companies will look to actually get value out of all the efforts they put into their data management strategies.
Sophisticated security breaches will start targeting laptops and mobile devices as points of attack – driving the need for advanced security and data loss prevention techniques.
There will be continued pressure on IT to calm the Bring Your Own Application (BYOA) storm – IT admins are focusing on delivering new services quickly and with a focus on user experience (ease of use, self-service, etc.), all while keeping to enterprise-requirements.
In 2015, we predict that all eyes will be on analytics, endpoint protection and keeping BYOA under control.”

Ed Lee, architect, and Kieran Harty, CTO and co-founder, Tintri, Inc., said:

“Software Innovation in Storage Unlocks the Hardware Innovations of the Last 5 Years. Not long ago the primary issues plaguing storage were performance and cost. Those issues have been tackled with hardware innovations, including flash, multicore, and 10GbE. Now the obstacle is data management, which is still abstracted in LUNs, volumes and other legacy concepts. Since the business thinks in VMs, the natural solution is to manage storage in VMs. The resulting visibility, automation and analytics unlocks the full capabilities of the hardware. Consider tablets-the hardware technology was available, but it was the simplicity of management (iPad / iOS) that transformed the market. In 2015, storage software will spark the beginnings of a similar transformation.
IT Generalists Can Manage Storage. Conventional storage is hard to manage and requires specialists steeped in LUNs, volumes, RAID, etc. As a result, storage has become a black box, expensive and hard to manage. But the silos of IT are being broken down, and so in 2015, IT generalists – virtualization admins, system engineers and software developers – will start to take ownership of their server, virtualization AND storage requirements. In turn, that elevates the storage admin to working on projects with more strategic value than carving up LUNs and volumes.
Democratization of Cloud (It’s Not Just About Amazon and Google Any More). Rising security risks, lack of a strong economic case for large-scale deployment and continuing challenge of adapting enterprise applications to the cloud force companies to explore private cloud. Many of the capabilities of public cloud will become available in the private cloud-allowing companies to realize scale, security, automation, data protection, and ultimately cost savings. Service providers will quickly grow to service the private clouds of organizations that don’t want to run their own infrastructure.
OpenStack Gets Real. OpenStack has been a point of discussion since 2010, but in 2015 it’s become very real. IBM, HP, Cisco, Red Hat, Oracle and VMware all support OpenStack, prompting many companies to start looking at OpenStack seriously. The momentum will start in software development (specifically DevOps) where the flexibility/agility of OpenStack is most compelling. Once value is realized it will naturally spread to other parts of the enterprise.
Customers Looking for Differentiated Flash Products. In 2015, customers will realize that buying basic flash-based storage doesn’t provide a lot of value, and it doesn’t address the root cause of data center pain. Why? Because flash performance without baked-in intelligence will be table stakes in 2015 – companies will see that driving an orange Ferrari while wearing a blindfold is cool for a short time, but not very bright in the end. So, they’ll demand total visibility (GPS in our metaphor) into individual VMs; and any flash provider that forces companies to continue to think in LUNs, volumes, etc. will quickly lose its shine.
Service Providers Turn to Storage as a Competitive Advantage. Cloud service providers compete on speed and reliability. In the past that has put the focus on their network. But smart providers have realized that storage can have greater amplification of their performance. They’ll turn to storage that removes guesswork; allowing for precise pricing, QoS guarantees and happier customers. Storage providers that build upon these sources of differentiation will be best positioned to capture the private cloud opportunity (per above).”

Jill Orhun, VP, marketing and strategy, Nexenta, Inc., said:
“Throughout 2014 we have seen more and more enterprises move towards a software-defined world. Whether they run on Vmware, Citrix, CloudStack or OpenStack ecosystems customers have started to scale their infrastructures to manage petabytes. This is only set to increase in 2015 as trends such as big data and the Internet of Things are adopted as part of more mainstream IT deployments. Throughout 2015 we will see more IT solutions come to market that specifically address the workload of big,ta and focus more on scale out architectures that require open integration from the big data software management layers. We are already seeing this type of architecture within object storage solutions on the market. Customers will continue to need cost-effective solutions for large capacity configurations and object storage is one way to solve this demand. Performance will continue to be a key issue as companies start to utilise their data repositories intelligently and with the need for real time analytics ‘flash’ whch is an excellent tool for certain wokloads, will continue to play it’s part in the evolving storage world. Software that can handle the increase of unstructured data with low TCO but that offer all the enterprise features that customers need will continue to evolve, as a result, 2015 should be a really exciting time for the storage industry with new developments around every corner.”

Top 5 Storage Predictions for 2015

Adoption of SDS will accelerate in general / SDS will be deployed more and more in the Top 500
OpenStack will be the top choice for hyper-scale deployments / integration of SDS and OpenStack will continue
Hyper-converged systems will get a bigger market share / more vendors use SDS to offer hyper-converged systems
The Top 5 MESS will continue to lose market share whilst SDS / ‘other systems’ will continue to build market share
Object storage will gain momentum

Gavin McLaughlin, VP of WW marketing, X-IO Technologies (Xiotech Corporation), said:
“Without a doubt, the most significant trend during 2014 has been the move from dedicated storage teams to a merging of the virtualisation admin (vAdmin) and storage admin roles. Through a combination of simplified management tools and the move towards software-defined storage, the need for dedicated operational staff purely to manage storage is thankfully reducing. The days of buying storage array hardware and then being pressured into buying mandatory bolt-on software, with costly maintenance charges, are now disappearing and higher level data management functions are moving up to the storage hypervisor.
A worrying trend that I’ve seen is the use of a sledgehammer to crack a nut in the form of All Flash Arrays being used for workloads such as VDI. While AFAs undoubtedly have their place for constant high I/O low latency workloads, for use cases such as VDI they’re simply overkill. What’s needed is a platform with an intelligent form of adaptive flash storage that uses high performance, high cost storage only when it’s needed and applies some logic to only move data should there be a potential ROI.
Throughout 2015 I expect, and hope, to see more realisation of the marketing hype and quite frankly misdirection and lies used in the storage industry. For too many years there’s been an increase in the amount of over-inflated claims by storage vendors with regards to performance and efficiency (such as compression and de-duplication figures). The car industry has been forced to evolve from ‘best-case’ miles-per-gallon statistics and use more real-world ‘urban’ figures so it’s time for the storage industry to do the same.
During 2015, another trend is the further reduction in cost of flash storage but with the ability to last in excess of 5 years when used appropriately. This will bring around the possibility to have an All Flash Array that can be truly zero touch for long periods and gives a sensible price/performance ratio. Until now, deploying all flash has meant compromising through increased cost, increased risk, or possibly both.”