Scale-out Storage Adoption Will Become Pervasive

It won’t just be for high-performance environments anymore. Users are looking for higher value and return from their investments; scale-out storage will be the key to match both performance and capacity requirements for those looking to achieve a faster ROI.

Many will realize the importance of having tape as part of the big cloud story. Tape isn’t dead; it is simply being positioned differently to meet customer requirements.

This has been on prediction lists for years; now this is fact. Unstructured data is the culprit. But business analytics and business intelligence will see significant increases in 2012 and beyond.

Big data workloads will really get into high gear when the biotech and life sciences sectors start to accelerate their creation of data for clinical research. Genomic sequencers are becoming more and more affordable, which means more and more data can be created in a much shorter time, helping these labs (both small and large) achieve greater relevance in this field. This means massive amounts of data will need to be managed across multiple tiers of storage.

Backup applications have always been a “sticky” application in customer environments. Virtualization offers users a choice to change how they think about backup and recovery. New, thinner approaches and more integrated approaches will be the new look of data protection in a virtualized world. Deduplication will be even more critically important to efficiently and effectively protect these infrastructures without having to compromise on performance or over-subscribing secondary storage to over compensate for architectural deficiencies.

Data delivery, data access, application mobility, data mobility, however it’s framed, is only going to become more prominent in 2012. Much more work will be done on these devices in 2012; we will begin to see how these devices will change the way business is conducted, from IT management to the field sales rep. These mobile devices will create data but will also deliver data in a much more meaningful and complete manner.

We are seeing significant drop in prices. Storage is becoming more affordable to the masses; home office users now have several terabytes of data stored locally and are now faced with similar challenges as the enterprise, such as how to manage and protect this data. Small business cloud services will continue to emerge, accelerating cloud adoption even more at this tier. However, the enterprise will continue to struggle with the public cloud.

For the public cloud to gain enterprise acceptance, security, access and control need to be improved. In 2012, cloud services companies will have to focus on how these three barriers can be broken down for the enterprise to begin to adopt the public cloud much more readily.

Crowd-sourcing is the act of sourcing tasks traditionally performed by specific individuals to a group of people or community (crowd) through an open call. We could very well see this begin to mature in 2012 and have real and serious impact on IT and how data centers are managed, next year and beyond.

Its clear that 2012 will be all about object-based storage. Simple is good.