Looking through a storage crystal ball, here are our top predictions for storage in 2013. Should these predictions come true, not only will the landscape of the IT industry change, but more importantly, innovation will happen at the pace customers need and not at the pace vendors dictate.
Storage Silos Come Crashing Down!
We predict there will be an emergence of storage solutions that provide a unified approach to procuring, provisioning, and managing enterprise data – solutions that are agnostic to the type of data, such as files, objects, blocks, and semi-structured or unstructured data.
Open Source Storage Software will Eat Proprietary Storage Software for Lunch!
The requirements and demands for a unified approach to managing storage created by new enterprise workloads will require a different approach by storage software vendors – one that is based on community-driven innovation.
Open Source Storage Software will Eat Storage Hardware for Dinner!
The rapid pace of innovation at the storage software layer is likely to fast outpace the innovation of hardware. Monolithic proprietary hardware and its software layer cannot be decoupled today. Rapid commoditization and standardization at the hardware level combined with increased intelligence at the software layer will change this in 2013.
Big Data and Small Storage – the Perfect Recipe for Success. Once big data projects move from proof-of-concept phase, organizations will realize that just because its big data, it doesn’t necessarily mean big storage. The basic tenets of big data reference architectures recommend a scale out storage infrastructure consisting of a collection of servers with small storage as opposed to a large monolithic scale up storage infrastructure.