Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2020. Read them in this 12th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Bruce Kornfeld, General Manager - Americas, StorMagic
How the 'Edge-olution' will Evolve the Storage Market
As 2019 comes to a close, one important
industry trend is clear: more data is being created at the edge than ever
before. IT continues to find that it is more efficient and cost-effective to
process and manage data at the location that it's being generated. This mass
movement away from expanding corporate datacenters and public clouds is
reshaping and transforming the storage landscape.
Here's a list of 2020 market
predictions that StorMagic envisions based on this "Edge-olution":
- Stemming from yesterday's Big Data craze, Artificial
intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) mature, and remain hot topics.
AI and ML spikes
and fuels global data explosion and the need for storage. Both consume
data from various different sources and attempt to correlate and identify
patterns in disparate data sets, creating data upon data.
- Smarter management tools emerge to administer the edge environment of tomorrow. Solution
simplicity and speed are the top requirements for staff managing hundreds,
thousands, or even tens of thousands of edge locations.
- High availability and security requirements soar at
the edge due to regulations, and to avoid
downtime impact. As edge computing technologies continue to mature,
datacenter class features like encryption with key management, fault
tolerance and five nines of availability, are now demanded in edge
offerings.
- Blockchain use cases evolve. As blockchain becomes more mainstream, its potential impact on
edge computing could be massive. Edge locations require new ways of
handling security, management and data protection due to the massive
number of sites that now require IT attention. Blockchain is a natural fit
to help solve these issues because of its distributed nature and the
ability to leverage a massive number of instances to track information
without dependence on a central location. This could dramatically change
the way IT manages edge computing sites.
Of the above, AI and ML will have the greatest
impact on the configuration, requirements and functions for storage at edge
computing sites in the coming 12-18 months. However, blockchain is quite an
interesting concept that could have a tremendous long-term impact on IT. Edge
computing is here to stay due to the "real-time" nature of business around the
world and the need to process data where it is created. IT departments will
continue to look for ways to cost-effectively deploy, protect and manage these
edge solutions in 2020 and beyond.
What changes do you envision at the edge in
2020? Follow us, @StorMagic, on Twitter to continue the discussion.
##
About the Author
Bruce
is an experienced technology executive who has held leadership roles in
marketing, alliances and business development in the storage, server,
networking and software industries. He joined StorMagic in 2017 as CMO, and
today serves as general manager of the Americas, where he is responsible for
the Americas region sales and go-to-market strategy, as well as global
strategic alliances and marketing. Prior to joining StorMagic, Bruce held
marketing leadership positions at Compellent, Dell and NCR. He helped
Compellent grow its revenue from $9M to more than $150M, which led to their IPO
and eventual sale to Dell for $960M, and was instrumental in building and
growing Dell's first storage division to over $1bn.