2024 Predictions by Peer Software

This article was written by Jimmy Tam, CEO, Peer Software, Inc., and written on December 15, 2023:

2024 Predictions
Active-Passive High Availability Practices Evolve – Active-Active Has its Moment

Without continuous availability and real-time access to data, businesses risk losing out to competitors, making decisions with inaccurate information, and more. So it is no wonder that CIOs are starting to demand more from their data centers. In the coming 12 months, it is likely that many IT leaders will start to adopt active-active capabilities, improving performance by distributing the workload across several nodes to allow access to the resources of all servers.

By moving away from active-passive technologies that simply don’t make the most of the available servers and often require manual intervention during outages, CIOs will ensure that data is actionable wherever it resides, is as close as possible to the end-user for performance, and that the load of data processing is spread across all compute and storage nodes whether it be at the edge, in the data center, or in the cloud.

Storage industry will start to productize AI and ML
AI and ML have so much promise, but they’re not being adopted as quickly as anyone in the industry anticipated. There’s a clear reason why: users simply don’t know how to realize the technologies’ full potential. Beyond ChatGPT, which is easy to use and incredibly popular, there’s no real out-of-the-box product for enterprise storage customers. So unless organizations have a data scientist on hand to help them navigate the intricacies of AI and ML, they’re very likely to hold off when it comes to implementing any kind of solution.

This presents a great opportunity for the storage industry and the smart companies are already starting to think about it. Through 2024, we’ll see the beginning of the productization of AI and ML. Ready-to-use packages will be developed so that users can easily understand what the technologies can help them achieve, while being straightforward to set up and run. Then watch, as AI and ML adoption increases.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure is here to stay – but much will move back on-premise
When Covid hit, VDIs were the reason many of us could continue to work. They offered users a flexible, consistent experience from wherever they logged in and became a lynchpin for organizations during the days of lockdown. But there was an issue: the hardware was difficult to get hold of. And the urgency we all became so used to during the pandemic meant there was no time to wait for the supply chain to right itself, so CIOs turned to the cloud.

Don’t get me wrong, the cloud has clear benefits. It is easy to implement, and it is elastic in nature, quickly responding to and growing with our needs. But it can be very expensive and, because cloud providers tend to charge for each transaction, costs can be difficult to predict.

Availability in the supply chain will bring about a shift towards migrating highly transactional workloads back on-premise.