Storage in 2016: Could abandonware claims come to the fore? Predictions are a mug’s game ... the trick is to keep them as non-specific as possible and not name names ... so here are mine! What is the future for storage in the enterprise? Well, 2016 is going to pan out to be an interesting year. There are company integrations and mergers to complete with more to come so I hear, and …
Storage hardware vendors are boring, expensive, messy and obsolete.
SMB/NFS file servers on Linux or Windows with scale out are faster, cheaper and more reliable.
Object storage runs as a service on top of an OS. Integrating it in a SAN is just plain stupid. Programmers just need a REST API. Object storage dates to around 1984 with Apple's nasty, horrible forked file system. Object storage currently has a similar problem ... lack of support for archiving objects (think zip or stuffit)... therefore, it will likely not go mainstream outside of "Applications" in the Openstack sense for a while.
We're heading back to a time when storage will just be a standard part of any server OS. Hardware vendors like NetApp and Dell/EMC will be old news.
That said, the "storage experts" I train insist nothing can ever be as good as fibrechannel... They have no idea how anything else (or even) FC works, but they know FC is faster and better.
Ethernet can be less costly than FC. That is certainly what the large cloud players (Google, AWS, Microsoft) are doing. I think what people neglect is that these players are not running Cisco ethernet networks. Difficult to see how you will save a bunch of cash by running a ton of Cisco Nexus ports instead of FC ports. If you white box network switches, then it isn't difficult to see.
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