2016 Storage Predictions from Avinash Lakshman, Hedvig CEO

Here are the 2016 storage predictions from Avinash Lakshman, founder and CEO, Hedvig, Inc.

1. In 2016 software-defined storage will break out of test environments
To-date, most SDS deployments have been in test/dev, VDI, or non-production IT environments. Why? It provided cheap, flexible storage sandboxes. But with data growing 10x faster than storage budgets and the relentless need for IT to do more with less, we’ll see SDS applied to traditional tier 1 and tier 2 environments in 2016. Expect to see a wholesale shift away from traditional arrays to software-defined solutions that lower the cost to own and operate storage by more than 60%. Most companies will do so as they refresh their incumbent SAN and NAS hardware, but many will take the plunge even if the equipment is not at the end of its lifecycle. The economics are just too compelling.

2. In 2016 the storage pendulum will swing away from hyperconverged solutions
2015 was “the year” of two things: all-flash arrays and hyperconverged appliances, with Pure and Nutanix leading each, respectively. We don’t see the all-flash trend slowing down, but we do see enterprises waning on hyperconvergence. Hyperconverged solutions (especially appliances) are a good fit for small/medium businesses, remote offices, and back office apps like Exchange. But enterprises desperate to reduce complexity began deploying hyperconverged solutions everywhere, creating suboptimal scaling and infrastructure economics. Expect to see a shift away from hyperconverged to a more traditional architecture where storage is decoupled from the compute tier. The difference? The storage tier will be all-software, hyperscale, and deployed on commodity servers.

3. In 2016 enterprises stop the insanity and deploy containers on bare metal
Container and microservices architectures have taken off in cloud-native and web companies. Not so much in the enterprise. In fact, Forrester estimates that just 4% of enterprises use Docker today. The crazy part: Enterprises commonly experiment with Docker containers deployed inside of VMs. There are legitimate security and storage reasons for doing so, but it’s not ideal. Expect to see enterprises getting more comfortable deploying containers in a true microservices architecture, with specific processes and app components running in separate Docker containers on bare metal. Production deployments will not skyrocket, though. Enterprise DevOps will explore security, orchestration, and storage tools to get more comfortable with bare metal deployments.

4. In 2016 cloud storage will go hybrid
Fact: public cloud storage can be as little as a few pennies per gig per month. Also a fact: network transit, retrieval, and various security and performance add-ons balloon that cost. The net result is that public cloud storage gets expensive, quickly. In fact companies with more than a petabyte of cloud storage are finding it cheaper to deploy on-premises software-defined storage clusters. The cost of the data center, infrastructure, power, and cooling can be cheaper than public clouds. Expect to see companies use intelligent cloud gateways and software-defined storage that support hybrid cloud. Hot and warm data will remain in private clouds, while older, colder data gets migrated to public clouds. The catch? These solutions need to be smart enough to do this dynamic migration automatically.