January

Happy New Year!

I have summarized a couple of 2015 predictions, wish-lists and trends at the beginning of the year for you below. Of course they represent my personal beliefs about where the IT and Storage industry will be heading in the next 12 months - so feel free to disagree!

First let me revisit the state of the art in HDD capacity as of January 2015, here's a great writeup of what is available today: As you can see, we are rapidly approaching the 10 TB capacity limit - but data access performance remains an ever bigger problem with those huge disk drives. Related to that, RAID protection becomes less practical with every TB we add for single drives, so the industry is looking into new ways to protect data as you can read here!
And for the SSD segment of enterprise storage, read the 2015 wish list for AFA's (all-flash arrays).


Second, here's a number of analyst predictions for top 2015 storage trends and market developments:
Hot storage technologies for 2015 (most notably Cloud-based disaster recovery or DRaaS among them) and top storage start-ups (many of them supporting flavors of SSDs to maximize performance)  to watch this year!
And lastly from the NetApp CTO and industry veteran Jay Kidd, here's his personal view on 2015 trends.

Third: meet "Docker", the next big thing after hypervisors! Or as is explained in this paragraph on docker.com: "Docker is an open platform for developers and sysadmins to build, ship, and run distributed applications". It may be a smart thing to start to learn about Docker early in 2015 - so I have listed the link to a four part summary/basic overview from "The Register" here. Enjoy!