In my 35 years in IT, I have never seen so much simultaneous change in technology. Every part of the IT stack is in transition - end user devices, networks, application design, virtual server software, physical server design, storage systems, and even storage media. Some of these transitions are well underway and will accelerate in 2015 while others are just starting to emerge. Either way, buckle up! IT is going to be a wild ride in 2015.

1. 1. Two Mythical Beasts–Internet of Things and Big
Data Analytics–Will Produce Corporeal Children
The rise of integrated telemetry in industrial
equipment, health monitoring devices, mobile
payment systems, along with a host of new
sensors measuring the world will provide the
relevant data fuel for the next wave of business
relevant analytics. Companies that had found
their existing datasets were not sufficient to yield
real insight can now correlate with real-world
datasets to optimize business processes and
change their customer’s experience. Acquisition
management of data from connected things
coupled with real-time and background analytics
tools will change how companies touch the world.
2. The Future of All-Flash Arrays is Not All Flash
Flash is transformative to the future of Enterprise
Storage. But the idea of an all-flash datacenter is
utter nonsense, and at least 80% of data will
continue to reside on disks. Cost matters, and the
least expensive SSDs will likely be 10 times more
expensive than the least expensive SATA disks
through the end of the decade. Compression and
deduplication apply to both disk and flash equally.
Every storage architecture will incorporate flash to
serve the ‘hot’ data. However, those that choose to
only include flash, and have no integration with
other hybrid flash/disk arrays, will be the hot rod in
the garage of IT. Fun to tinker with, but not the
reliable storage workhorse IT needs.
3. A Multi-Vendor Hybrid Cloud is the
Only Hybrid Cloud that Will Matter
Every customer is using cloud in some form. Just as
most customers were reluctant to bet on a single
vendor for their on-premise IT, they will choose to
work with multiple cloud providers. Avoidance of
lock-in, leverage in negotiations, or simply a desire
for choice will drive them to seek a hybrid cloud
that does not lock them in to any single provider.
SaaS vendors who offer no way to extract data will
suffer. PaaS layers that only run in a single cloud
will see less usage. Software technologies that can
be deployed on premise and in a range of clouds
will find favor with customers thinking strategically
about their model for IT.
4. Software Defined Storage Will Build a
Bridge Between Public and Private Clouds
Software Defined Storage (SDS), with the ability to
be deployed on different hardware and supporting
rich automation capabilities, will extend its reach
into cloud deployments and build a data fabric that
spans premise and public clouds. SDS will provide a
means for applications to access data uniformly
across clouds and simplifies the data management
aspects of moving existing applications to the cloud.
SDS for object storage will bridge on-premise and
cloud object repositories. The storage efficiencies in
some software-defined storage offerings, such as
Cloud ONTAP, also reduce the cost of moving data
to and from the public cloud, and storing active data
in the public cloud for long periods of time.
5. Docker Replaces Hypervisors as the Container
of Choice for Scale-Out Applications
As new applications for SaaS or large-scale
enterprise use cases are written using the
scale-out microservices model, Docker
application containers have proven to be more
resource efficient than VMs with a complete OS.
All major VM orchestration systems now support
Docker and we will see the emergence of a robust
ecosystem for data management and other
surrounding services in 2015.
6. Hyper-Converged Infrastructure
is the New Compute Server
Hyper-converged Infrastructure (HCI) products
are becoming the new compute server with
Direct-Attached Storage (DAS). Traditional data
center compute consists of blades or boxes in
racks that have dedicated CPUs, memory, I/O
and network connections, and run dozens of
VMs. HCI such as VMware’s EVO allows local DAS
to be shared across a few servers, making the
unit of compute more resilient, while broadly
shared data is accessed over the LAN or SAN.
Starting in 2015, the emergence of solid state
storage, broader adoption of remote direct
memory access (RDMA) network protocols, and
new interconnects will drive a compute model
where the cores, memory, and IOPs storage will
be integrated in a low-latency fabric that will
make them behave as a single rack-scale system.
CTO 2015
PREDICTIONS
In my 35 years in IT, I have never seen so much simultaneous
change in technology. Every part of the IT stack is in transition -
end user devices, networks, application design, virtual server
software, physical server design, storage systems, and even
storage media. Some of these transitions are well underway and
will accelerate in 2015 while others are just starting to emerge.
Either way, buckle up! IT is going to be a wild ride in 2015.
Jay Kidd
Chief Technology Officer
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