What to Expect in 2025 for Enterprise Storage

An informative Storagenewsletter exclusive article written by Eric Herzog, CMO, Infinidat Ltd.

Generative AI (GenAI) and next-gen data protection are driving new and interesting conversations about what enterprises will do with their storage infrastructure in the new year to accommodate these significant developments.

These are 2 of multiple reasons that 2025 is gearing up to be a big year for enterprise storage. Here is a snapshot of what is expected to be top of mind:

1. GenAI: The Rise of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
2. Next-gen Data Protection: The Shift to Cyber Focus, Recovery First
3. Hybrid Multi-cloud Storage: The Best of Both Worlds (On-premises & Public Cloud)
4. Automation and Optimization: The Demand for More Efficient Enterprise Storage Continues
5. Data Infrastructure Modernization: The Next Steps with a Unified Approach

Let’s take a closer look at each one:

1- GenAI: The Rise of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
Enterprise storage infrastructure has taken on a new role as the foundation for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). The adoption of RAG is on a trajectory to rapidly increase in 2025 as a storage infrastructure-led architecture that improves the accuracy and speed of AI.

RAG is a GenAI-centric framework for augmenting, refining and optimizing the output of AI models, including Large Language Models (LLMs) and Small Language Models (SLMs). It enables enterprises to ensure that the answers from AI models remain relevant, up-to-date, and within the right context. With their powerful, generative AI capabilities, AI models power intelligent chatbots and other natural language processing applications, which are used to answer user questions by cross-referencing authoritative information sources.

Enterprise storage solution providers, such as Infinidat, are stepping forward to fill the gap, complementing the work that hyperscalers are doing to build out LLMs and SLMs on a larger scale to do the initial training of the AI models. RAG eliminates the need for continually re-training AI models, which are resource intensive. It also reduces the prevalence of ‘AI hallucinations,’ a common problem with GenAI. Enterprises that are deploying or planning to deploy GenAI will soon not be able to be without RAG.

The combination of AI models and storage-guided RAG is a key component for defining the future of GenAI.

On November 13, 2024, Infinidat announced its RAG workflow deployment architecture. Infinidat will play a critical role in RAG deployments, leveraging data on InfiniBox enterprise storage solutions, which are perfectly suited for retrieval-based AI workloads.

2 – Next-gen Data Protection: Shift to Cyber Focus, Recovery First
For 2025, next-gen data protection has emerged as the new line of defense vs. extremely harmful cyberattacks vs. enterprises, such as ransomware and malware. Next-gen data protection expands the purview of what is protected and how it is protected within an enterprise data infrastructure. It adds preemptive and predictive capabilities that help mitigate the effects of massive cyberattacks.

Next-gen data protection provides a cyber-focused, recovery-first methodology. ‘Recovery-first’ means the endpoint has to be first. This is why enterprises will be looking to deploy automated cyber protection in 2025 to integrate cyber storage resilience into security operation centers and security applications. At the 1st signal of a cyberattack, an immutable snapshot of your data is taken automatically to help reduce the threat window.

Next-gen data protection includes the traditional aspects of data protection, such as being able to handle backup repositories and being able to snapshot and replicate data. But the next-gen of data protection includes cyber storage resilience and guaranteed ultra-rapid cyber recovery. Being proactive to optimize for restoration of data makes it simpler on the backend.

Next-gen data protection ensures BC, which is, according to the World Economic Forum, one of the biggest concerns that organizational leaders have (67%) – more than any other cyber risk. BC is the biggest risk of a cyberattack. As reported by the World Economic Forum, 91% of business leaders and cyber leaders say that they believe a far-reaching and catastrophic cyber event is “at least somewhat likely in the next 2 years.“

Infinidat offers one of a most comprehensive, integrated and proven portfolios of next-gen data protection solutions in the industry.

3 – Hybrid Multicloud Storage: Best of Both Worlds (On-premises and Public Cloud)
The marriage of private cloud storage and public cloud environments has created the groundswell demand for hybrid multi-cloud storage that is gearing up for 2025. This integrated approach that brings together on-premises/private cloud and the public cloud is set to unleash the highest levels of flexibility, cost efficiency, and use case-specific adoption that the enterprise market has ever known. The on-ramps between on-premises storage and multiple clouds, including AWS and Azure, have simplified the ability of an enterprise to leverage the best of both environments.

A hybrid multi-cloud approach to enterprise storage has become the go-to strategy for enterprises. It’s impractical to put all data into the public cloud, of course, but it’s an appealing option for certain use cases, such as backup, BC, DR, DevOps, and extra burst storage capacity. Meanwhile, keeping business-critical and mission-critical workloads in the data center (with a cloud-like experience – aka your ‘private cloud’) proves to be more economical, more efficient, more performing, and more controlled.

By combining both worlds of private and public cloud and having an end-to-end hybrid multi-cloud experience across on-premises and the off-premises public cloud (namely, Azure and AWS), enterprise data infrastructures are made easier to manage, more consistent, more cost-effective, and more flexible. This applies to enterprise storage just as much as it does for various forms of enterprise computing.

The need for a hybrid multi-cloud storage solution that can deliver these benefits is an essential linchpin for unlocking the real advantages to use enterprise storage arrays on-premises and in the cloud for maximum value.

With Infinidat’s announcement last year of InfuzeOS Cloud Edition in AWS, the company’s hybrid multi-cloud storage solution is available in Azure and AWS environments. Both are powered by InfuzeOS, the SDS that powers our InfiniBox, InfiniBox SSA II, and InfiniGuard platforms.

4 – Automation and Optimization: Demand for More Efficient Enterprise Storage Continues
In 2025, the storage market will continue to experience an increase in automation and optimization, as enterprises continue to simplify the complexity of their storage infrastructure. They want storage to use less floorspace, less rack space and less overhead. They are requiring their storage arrays to be more energy-efficient for the purpose of sustainability and Green IT. And they want to achieve cost savings from their storage.

Storage efficiency is a multi-year journey for most enterprises. It calls for a strategy that utilizes higher-performance storage arrays with built-in automation that usher in a set-it-and-forget-it approach. It spotlights storage systems that are more power-efficient with higher capacity. It takes a look at the storage consumption model that the enterprises use, and it adopts more flexible consumption models.

Ultimately, storage optimization is a process of improving enterprise storage by lowering costs, enhancing performance and getting more out of what you have – in other words, less is more. Less floorspace, less rack space, less carbon emission, but more capacity, more performance, more availability and at a better TCO.

Infinidat is at the forefront of making enterprise storage more cost-efficient, energy-efficient and easier to manage.

5 – Data Infrastructure Modernization: Next Steps with Unified Approach
We foresee the continued increase in market traction in 2025 for a major shift from standard VM-based workloads to other forms of virtualization as well as Kubernetes/container deployments. Virtualized applications and VM workloads are an essential piece of any viable strategy to modernize data center infrastructures, but, with recent changes in that market, companies are looking for alternative solutions.

These solutions range from several alternatives to VM infrastructure such as OpenShift Virtualization Manager to Hyper-V to the use of Red Hat containers and other forms of containerization. Enterprise customers are interested in a scalable, supported and consistent solution for VM-based applications and workloads, designed for enterprise hybrid multi-cloud deployments. Enterprises are seeking support for virtualized and containerized application alternatives and access to an integrated set of trusted tools that maximize the advantages on a unified platform.

The landscape for VM workloads and applications is changing. Enterprises are interested in strategic paths for VM infrastructure migrations. A unified approach will be the preferred approach in 2025. By bringing standard VM-based workloads to other virtualized alternatives or to Kubernetes and container deployments, it will help eliminate the workflow and development silos that typically exist between traditional and cloud-native application stacks.

In the new year, we expect to see the rising adoption of a more consistent foundation to deliver VM alternatives and Kubernetes applications, especially benefiting hybrid multi-cloud management models. A compelling reason for it is that storage allows for scalability, flexibility, and centralized management.

The InfiniBox solution has been successfully tested to work with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization as well as with container deployments. This technical validation opens new possibilities for enterprise customers and channel partners to deploy, migrate, and manage new and existing VM workloads and virtualized applications using Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization and container-based alternatives.

About Eric Herzog
Eric Herzog is the CMO at Infinidat. Prior to joining Infinidat, Herzog was CMO and VP of global storage channels at IBM Storage Solutions. His executive leadership experience also includes: CMO and SVP of alliances for all-flash storage provider Violin Memory, and SVP of product management and product marketing for EMC’s enterprise and mid-range systems division.