Sometimes it’s very confrontational to look back five years. When I read what was being written about storage back then, it was very different than how we discuss storage right now. And I guess it’s fair to assume that storage will again be quite different five years hence.

Par Arnaud Bacros, Country Manager Ad Interim EMC Belux

Let’s first take a glance back at 2008. How was storage discussed then? It’s hard to believe now, but topics like big data, cloud computing, mobility and storage-as-a-service were hardly being talked about. Well, futurists did mention those topics, but they seemed so far off. Virtualization was quite a hot topic then, and VDI was a promising new theme. Hard to imagine.

Well, it’s probably not too farfetched to assume that storage will again be very different five years from now. Just like we couldn’t predict in 2008 what storage would be like now, it’s not easy to see what will define storage in 2018. Yet there’s a couple of things on the horizon that I’m quite sure will turn into reality.

For one, the role of software will become much more important as we move down the path of ‘software-defined storage’ and the ‘software-defined datacenter’. The reason is simple: everything is becoming software, which gives CIOs a much greater independence of platform. Earlier this year, at EMC World in Las Vegas, we announced ViPR, a software layer that manages both the storage infrastructure and the data residing within that infrastructure.

Software-defined storage

Software-defined storage will have a huge impact on the architecture of the datacenter. Server design changed considerably when compute was virtualized, and as storage will be further virtualized, storage and network design will also evolve.

Another change that I see coming is the growing demand on proximity of data. As volumes of data increase, the need will arise to have all this data as close to the applications that use it, as possible. And it will not be just one application that wants fast access to this data, several applications will require proximity of the same data. Getting the right information to the right place, at the right time and at the right cost, will be a major challenge to IT departments and storage vendors alike. You might call this `information logistics’. Scale-out architectures may well become the standard a few of years from now.

This may all sound a bit improbable right now, but let’s not forget how fast storage has evolved over the last five years. I’ll wager that trend is set to accelerate.

Arnaud Bacros, Country Manager Ad Interim EMC Belux