Pure Storage Predictions for 2019

These predictions are attributed to Patrick Smith, field CTO, EMEA, Pure Storage, Inc.

No More Compromise – The Hybrid Cloud Future:
The cloud divide that currently exists is forcing organisations to compromise. This is no small compromise either; infrastructure underpins every business and needs to be able to respond to the unique demands placed upon it. At present the public cloud is not purpose-built for enterprise needs, and enterprise-grade storage isn’t as user-friendly, agile or scalable as public cloud.

The problems facing modern enterprises are complex and the challenges of moving data between public cloud and on-premise solutions need to be ironed out. In 2019 we will see more robust and unified multi-cloud solutions that provide both the flexibility and simplicity that organisations need when bridging this divide.

The arrival of a truly hybrid architecture will create an environment that allows enterprises to combine the agility and simplicity of the public cloud with the enterprise functionality of on-prem. In this hybrid cloud world applications can be developed once and deployed seamlessly across owned and rented clouds, giving customers the ultimate flexibility to turn data into value wherever that data resides.

Containers and the Hybrid Cloud:
Container technologies have proven to be very attractive, particularly in DevOps environments, but the initial lack of persistent containerised storage made them a poor fit for many enterprise production applications. This held back adoption.

Automated, intelligent and scalable storage provisioning makes deploying large-scale container environments to an enterprise data centre possible.

As a result of the development of container storage-as-a-service, in 2019, we believe that the new normal will be running production applications in containers irrespective of whether they are state-less or data-rich. Container hosting environments ease development, accelerate deployment and simplify scaling as part of the maturing adoption of DevOps and site reliability engineering methodologies. This means that businesses can drive fast innovation and delivery of new features to their customers.

Container adoption will increasingly be driven by the demand for cost effective deployments into hybrid cloud environments with the ability to flexibly run applications either on-prem or in the public cloud based on their requirements or characteristics.

NVMe over Fabrics: Next-generation media
We introduced NVMe into our arrays some time ago, before making it standard across the FlashArray line in May 2018. Cost-effective all-NVMe for every workload can be a crucial advantage for all businesses. NVMe makes everything faster – databases, virtualised and containerised environments, test/dev initiatives and web-scale applications.

We expect NVMe over Fabrics to move from niche deployments and take a step towards the mainstream next year. This is the next logical evolution. With price competitive NVMe-based storage providing consistent low latency performance, the final piece of the puzzle will be the delivery of an end-to-end capability through the addition of NVMe-oF for front-end connectivity.

This will be particularly applicable to environments seeking better performance, even lower latency and less compute overhead; all enabled by NVMe-oF. When you can deliver on these promises to the business using the same underlying infrastructure, it just makes sense that NVME-oF will become a popular choice.