NetApps 11 Storage-Related Predictions for 2011

by Chris Preimesberger

Most, if not all, companies will have adopted a “Virtualize First” policy for new applications. The rush of so-called millennials, (people born between 1980 and 2000) into the workforce will push the IT move to virtualize desktops and deliver mobile apps in order to give users the capabilities and functionality they demand.

Most companies will be at least one-third virtualized, having migrated all of their least critical applications to virtual machines. 2011 will also begin the migration of business critical production apps. This transition will stretch beyond 2011, by which time most companies will be two-thirds virtualized.

There will be even more talk about cloud IT services, but buyers are still cautious. There will also be a lot of talk about the hybrid cloud. The cloud hype will continue to get louder until IT-sponsored deployment cycles start in earnest.

A battle for new apps infrastructure will emerge with traditional IT as a Service vendors on one side and Microsoft Azure, VMware SpringSource, SalesForce Heroku, Hadoop and Google Apps on the other side. This is already happening to a degree, but will heat up in 2011.

There will be more use of flash memory to accelerate enterprise applications. There will be various models of deployment for the technology—arrays or host-side, cache or primary storage—as customers and vendors look for more ways to use it.

Object storage will be a hot discussion topic in 2011 with expanding enterprise deployments starting by 2012. As a result, SNIA’s CDMI will gain traction with multiple vendor announcements.

Data centers will become more modular and pre-configured, being built and installed one shipping container at a time. As a result, rack and container-optimized systems will emerge with an emphasis on flexibility and efficiency at the rack and container level of granularity.

Companies need to rapidly deploy modernized IT systems and will look to squeeze as many capabilities as they can out of their infrastructure in order to achieve greater efficiency. Vendors will oblige by shipping preconfigured systems with integrated IT setup and management tools. This will have a huge impact on people, processes and agility.

IT will continue to see more strategic partnerships announced as customers demand more integration, simplicity and standardization as a means to deploy private clouds that can compete with the economics and agility of public offerings.

Unified Ethernet networks will continue to converge on today’s Ethernet and Fibre Channel networks. This approach drives down infrastructure costs for FCoE, NAS and iSCSI.

Unified storage will be the preferred storage portfolio in the data center. Rather maintain incompatible storage silos side by side, a fully interoperable portfolio of unified systems will collaborate to store, protect, replicate and archive cloud data throughout its lifecycle. This will enable economies of storage capacity and operational scale only possible with a unified storage deployment.