Nowadays we speak a lot about new features, roadmaps, technical details about dedupe on primary storage or automated tiering and so on, but what is going to happen in the next few years?
Each vendor is trying to explain why its solution is better than others and how they have the ability to do more with less, support your explosive growth and simplify your data storage life (uhm!)
Small and innovative vendors have the technology leadership while big ones are running after them but with a lot of money to copy or buy good ideas!
In the last years we have seen a convergence in all about servers with the result of x86 and Virtualization predominance. Hardware for servers is no longer important: it’s a commodity! Yes, you may prefer IBM because it’s black painted or Dell for the leds on the front panel or HP because they are the #1 in sales or Cisco for something else but you can change the vendor whatever you want! The x86 race is no more about features and capabilities but about quality, support and services!
Other pieces of the infrastructure are collapsing in a converged layer and FCoE is the most famous example. We need to take care about the first hints: the storage controllers are already converging on x86, hard disks are standard, protocols and connection links are standard… someone is talking about Virtual Storage Appliances.
What will happen next? Will storage become a commodity in few years?