2018 Predictions of 38 Storage Vendors

This study took place these last few weeks. We have asked a selection of 50 CEOs and other leaders of the storage industry about their 2018 predictions and got finally 38 answers to discover some trends or at least repeatable patterns and topics.

To participate companies had to produce three predictions with a short paragraph illustrating each point.

The list of vendors is: Avere Systems, C3DNA, Caringo, CloudEndure, Cloudian, Cohesity, Coraid, DataCore, Datos IO, Datrium, DDN Storage, DriveScale, E8 Storage, Elastifile, Hedvig, Igneous, Iguazio, Infinidat, iXsystems, Kaminario, Komprise, Minio, NetApp, NooBaa Storage, Panasas, Panzura, Portworx, Primary Data, ProphetStor, Quantum, Qumulo, Reduxio, Rubrik, Spanning Cloud Apps, StorONE, StrongBox Data Solutions, Vexata and WekaIO.

We studied all answers and have found out some common topics among these players. Interestingly, we didn’t notice storage or networking technologies neither specific devices or components, the only exception being NVMe.

Four top topics are present in many of these predictions:

• Cloud with its hybrid and multi-cloud iterations
• AI/machine learning impact and role in date center, storage and data management
• Data management, data aware and metadata
• Software-defined storage (SDS) obviously as it supports the agnostic cloud approach.

Among all these predictions, we have selected one prediction from each vendor, here is our selection by company in alphabetic order:

Avere Systems – Scott Jeschonek, director of cloud solutions and Dan Nydick, Technical director
Myth: The file system is dead

C3DNA – Rao Mikkilineni, interim CEO
Virtual private datacenter and workload mobility will unify public and private clouds 

Caringo – Adrian Herrera, VP marketing
The metadata deluge driven by AI, machine learning and IoT will accelerate

CloudEndure – Gil Shai, CRO
The transition to cloud disaster recovery will continue to strengthen and more and more enterprises will move their disaster site to the public cloud for the benefits of cost, flexibility and visibility (vs. an on premise disaster site)

Cloudian – Gary Ogasawara, VP engineering
AI will trigger an avalanche of data  and help dig out from it, with the help of metadata

Cohesity – Mohit Aron, CEO
Data centers will continue to shrink, through the application of hyperconvergence to both the primary and secondary storage parts of the data center

Coraid – Brantley Coile, CEO
Pure Storage will be bought by Cisco Systems

DataCore – George Teixeira, CEO
Making infrastructure invisible: software-defined and hyperconverged become hybrid-converged

Datos IO – Peter Smails, VP marketing and business development
Multi-cloud goes mainstream

Datrium – Brian Biles, CEO
Primary and backup storage converge

DDN Storage – Paul Bloch, CEO
Data gets shifted up another rung of the ladder and moves to the top table for enterprises

DriveScale – Gene Banman, CEO
Companies don’t become global, they start global

E8 Storage – Zivan Ori, CEO
The NVMe protocol will become the standard for SSDs over time

Elastifile – Amir Aharoni, CEO
The prodigal son returns: Object storage can’t go it alone…File storage becomes focal point for cloud convergence

Hedvig – Avinash Lakshman, CEO
Like Docker for containers, Kubernetes becomes the de facto cloud orchestrator

Igneous – Steve Pao, CMO
Data management needs to evolve to handle unstructured data

Iguazio – Asaf Somekh, CEO
We’ll see a shift from using traditional block or file storage to cloud-native environments which use a data layer that directly attaches storage or flash and leverages the resiliency and data management features built into the data services middleware

Infinidat – Brian Carmody, CTO
Cloud makes more inroads with the enterprise

iXsystems – Mike Lauth, CEO
Proliferation of NVMe will accelerate, and NVMe will become commonplace for hybrid storage arrays and NVMe will become the dominant technology in all flash arrays as well

Kaminario – Dani Golan, CEO, and Eyal David, CTO
The storage industry will continue its trajectory away from traditional scale-up array architectures towards more flexible, software-defined architectures

Komprise – Krishna Subramanian, COO
Another year of flat storage budgets mmakes analytics-driven data management critical

Minio – Anand Babu Periasamy, CEO
Object storage breaks enterprise resistance

NetApp – Mark Bregman, CTO
Data will become self-aware

NooBaa Storage – Yuval Dimnik, founder
Containers footprint will grow with fluid move between on-premises and cloud

Panasas – Curtis Anderson, senior architect
HPC storage subsystems will need to rapidly implement several different sets of ‘data management and compliance’ feature sets

Panzura – Patrick Harr, CEO
Multi-cloud will become a formal strategy

Portworx – Murli Thirumale, CEO
The complexity of building and running Kubernetes applications will be addressed by the rise in Kubernetes platforms

Primary Data – Lance Smith, CEO
Adoption of analytics fuels storage and data intelligence

ProphetStor – Eric Chen, CEO
Self-driven/automated datacenters through AI-powered software bringing increased resilience and economies of scale in the datacenters

Quantum – Molly Presley, VP of global marketing
Intelligent file systems will push object storage in the corner where it belongs (capacity and LT retention)

Qumulo – Peter Godman, CTO
All major cloud vendors will start to build or buy file storage, as they realize that quality, scalable file storage is essential for capturing compute-intensive workloads

Reduxio – Jacob Cherian, VP products and product strategy and Mike Grandinetti, chief marketing and corporate strategy officer
Convergence of primary and secondary storage

Rubrik – Chris Wahl, chief technologist
In 2018, we will see an armageddon when it comes to delivering cloud services directly to the enterprise

Spanning Cloud Apps – Mat Hamlin, VP of product
Adoption of SaaS by the mid-market and enterprise continues to rapidly grow

StorONE – Gal Naor, CEO
Software will continue to dominate the storage landscape

StrongBox Data Solutions – Floyd Christofferson, SVP products
Cross-platform storage automation 

Vexata – Zahid Hussain, CEO
AI, machine learning and cognitive systems will drive infrastructure decisions

WekaIO – Liran Zvibel, CEO
Stateless access to storage

All comprehensive predictions from all vendors following this link.