2019 Predictions by Western Digital

According to Narayan Venkat, VP, data center systems, and/or

Stefaan Vervaet, senior director of global strategic alliances, Western Digital Corporation:

In 2019, we will start to see organizations move toward the orchestration of large-scale containerization. In 2019, we will see further disaggregation of all pieces – memory, compute, networking and storage – and the adoption of broad-based container capabilities. With this further disaggregation, we will start to see organizations move toward the orchestration of large-scale containerization.

For life sciences, we will be one step closer to accelerating precision medicine diagnoses, which means faster time to both diagnose and treat life-threatening diseases.
 
In 2019, the demands of 5G will drive the expansion of a new platform ecosystem. In 2019, we will see a new platform ecosystem expand and evolve as the demands associated with 5G increase. And, within 2-3 years, the new platform ecosystem will be mainstream. Because 5G won’t be able to support the bandwidth that is required to support all of the IoT devices, machine learning will need to occur at the edge to ensure optimization of the data. The new platform will be a complete edge platform supported by RISC-V processors, ensuring compute moves as close to the data as possible.
 
In 2019, it will be common for organizations to adopt machine learning into the business revenue stream. Up until now, for most organizations, machine learning has been a concept, but in 2019, we will see real production installations. As a result, organizations will adopt machine learning — at scale – and it will have a direct impact on the business revenue stream.
 
In 2019, smaller clouds at the edge will start to sprout. With the proliferation of connected ‘things,’ we have an explosion of data repositories. As a result, in 2019, we will see smaller clouds at the edge – or zones of micro clouds – sprout across devices in order to effectively process and consolidate the data being produced by not only the ‘thing,’ but all of the applications running on the ‘thing.’
 
In the next three years, 4 out of 10 new software engineering hires will be data scientists. As noted in the 451 Research report, Addressing the Changing Role of Unstructured Data With Object Storage, “the interest in and availability of analytics is rapidly becoming universal across all vertical markets and companies of nearly every size, creating the need for a new generation of data specialists with new capabilities for understanding the nature of data and translating business needs into actionable insight.” As a result of this demand to shift data into action, organizations will prioritize hiring data scientists, and in the next three years, 4 out of 10 new software engineering hires will be data scientists.
 
According to Martin Fink, CTO, Western Digital Corporation:

In 2019, open composability will come of age and start to go mainstream. Data is not rigid and the infrastructure in which it lives cannot be rigid either. Although ‘composability” is not a new term, in 2019, we will see open composability, versus today’s inflexible, proprietary solutions, come of age and start to go mainstream as organizations look to build composable infrastructures on open standards to allow for specialized configurations that are specific to their workloads and address diverse data.

In 2019, we will see the proliferation of RISC-V based silicon. As the IoT grows, the longevity and lifecycle of all connected ‘things’ comes into question. After all, workloads are constantly changing, and processing demands are in flux. In 2019, we will see a proliferation of RISC-V based silicon as there will be an increased demand from organizations who are looking to specifically tailor (and adapt) their IoT embedded devices to a specific workload, while reducing costs and security risks associated with silicon that is not open-source.
 
In 2019, the first step toward a fabric-based infrastructure will be complete. Although the industry aspires to build a fabric infrastructure – one that is built on ‘a set of compute, storage, memory and I/O components joined through a fabric interconnect and the software to configure and manage them’ – we are several years away from it happening and organizations starting to shift their IT. With that being said: in 2019 we will realize the first step on a trajectory toward fabric infrastructure, including fabric attached memory, with the wide-spread adoption of fabric attached storage. This may seem like a small step, but the commitment to FAS means we are taking the necessary steps, as an industry, to ensure all components are connected with one another, allowing compute to move closer to where the data is stored rather than data being resigned to several steps away from compute.
 
In 2019, energy-assist will begin to finally make a transition away from PMR. In 2019, adoption of energy-assist storage will begin, as customers seek higher capacities, at lower costs, for their data centers. Organizations will need more storage space, but they will be unwilling to sacrifice performance for capacity, and as a result, they will look to new energy-assist technologies to deliver a cost-effective solution.
 
In 2019, devices will come alive at the edge. The conversation about autonomous cars and the power of the IoT will shift in 2019 as both enterprises and consumers watch the devices powered at the edge come alive. Regardless of how many IoT devices are unleashed, their success hinges on one critical component – the speed of compute. In 2019, the compute power will get closer to the data produced by the devices, allowing it to be processed in real-time, and devices to awaken and realize their potential.

For the automotive industry, this means we are one-step closer to realizing the possibilities of fully autonomous vehicles populating our roadways. With data getting closer to the edge, cars will be able to tap into machine learning to make the instantaneous decisions needed to maneuver on roads and avoid accidents.