Predictions From Four Storage Companies

 David Siles, VP of channels and alliances, DataGravity, Inc.

Security concerns are at an all-time high with consistent hacks and breaches in 2014, and IT users have learned that the source of the most severe risks to their organizations may be lurking undetected in their own stores of dark data. The market is now seeking differentiated products in the market, such as solutions that secure, protect and analyze data at its core and in one solution. To meet these needs in 2015, IT professionals must be armed with the technology and expertise needed to offer a fresh, new angle on topics like primary storage, data analytics, infrastructure security, and streamlining operations.

The storage market is ripe for innovation at its core. After years of advances to data center infrastructure taking place above the storage layer, IT pros are now ceasing to regard storage as a stagnant container and instead calculating the potential value it can add by gleaning insights from data at the point of storage. 2015 will be the last year storage is considered a “retirement home” for business information – instead, it is the year storage will become the key asset in transforming data into business value.

For the channel, solution providers will go mobile – customer response timing is critical, and to demonstrate the value of products and services, channel pros should be prepared at all times with access to details and resources that show how the technology solutions in their portfolio will serve a customer’s organization.

  Lynn LeBlanc, CEO and founder, HotLink Corp.

In 2014 we saw increased adoption of public cloud services among enterprises, largely due to the flexibility and economics those services provide. It’s hard for CIOs to ignore this agile, scalable, pay-as-you-go business model as they seek to manage their balance sheets and delivery more with less. What was once just a test-and-dev proving ground has paved the way for other hybrid IT deployments, such as DR and BC, at price points that rival basic backup. CIOs are now ready to embark on the path to mixing on- and off-premise resources for mission-critical applications.

Moving ahead into 2015, we’ll start to see more comprehensive hybrid IT deployments. The training wheels are off. DR and BC in the cloud will become the norm. We can also expect to see more determined focus on what other on-premise resources are best suited to move to public clouds based on a company’s budget, resources and skill sets. As a result, CIOs will need to sort fact from fiction and choose solutions that provide an easy, unified approach to hybrid IT management. Everyone is cloud washing existing solutions and tools; companies will need to closely evaluate which vendors can truly help them transform their IT infrastructure.

Even the former public cloud naysayers have done an about face. Hybrid IT in the enterprise, here to stay.

 Scott Davis, CTO, Infinio Systems, Inc.

A shakeup in storage architecture into a performance layer and a capacity layer
As the unstructured data explosion continues, fueled by the Internet of Things and multi-media content, this data will need both cost-effective storage capacity and high-performance access.  We’ll see mainstream recognition that these two dimensions of storage are better suited to independent evolution, moving from a tightly coupled model to the decoupling of storage performance from storage capacity.

Emerging core storage technology (part 1): Shingled/SMR drives for high capacity
While flash will continue to grow in popularity, spinning media is not disappearing: SMR (shingled magnetic recording) drives emerge delivering a significant capacity advantage. This technology can deliver 2.5x greater capacity than current spinning drives, with terabyte-size platters as low as $.03/GB. Clearly the death of spinning disks is not at all imminent.

Emerging core storage technology (part 2): NVDIMM-based flash for high performance
Server-attached flash will continue to gain momentum and we’ll start to see significant performance advances with non-volatile memory interfaces. The next generation is NVDIMMs, non-volatile, persistent storage technologies that are connected directly to the memory bus or DIMM slot. Initial performance will be under 10μs, an order of magnitude faster than the current mainstream flash approaches.

Data protection shifts in form and moves to the cloud
In the past few years, snapshots have taken center stage over traditional backup. They’re less costly operationally, with a smaller downtime window to capture the backup, and they provide faster recovery. Couple this with rapidly dropping prices of cloud storage, and you can see why snapshots stored on cloud-based object storage will increasingly replace traditional corporate backups.

 John Gentry, VP marketing and alliances, Virtual Instruments, Inc.

At the start of each year there’s a lot of excitement around the next big thing and latest and greatest technology. For example, this past year people were pretty enthusiastic about flash storage. However, the hottest tech is not always the most effective or appropriate – and that’s certainly true for flash. 2015 will be the year enterprises start recognizing some of the potential pitfalls that come with all-flash storage arrays. Flash offers great benefits in the way of speed and efficiency, but those benefits vary greatly depending on the actual workload, and it’s also pretty pricey. As a result, certain applications and environments might not see enough return on the implementation to make it worth the investment. By the end of this year, global enterprises will have gotten past the initial hype of flash and be looking at the actual value delivered. IT teams will begin incorporating performance monitoring and management platforms to find out what specific workloads in their environments really warrant such a costly initiative.