Data has changed everything, and everything will change data

Source: NetApp. Scurfield.

Data has become a transformative driver in delivering real-time e-services for knowledge-based consumers, says NetApp. The company shared its outlook for 2017 recently, discussing how data has and will continue to change the way business is conducted.

Key is a change in user expectations, of iPhone-like simplicity and self-management, and the integration of applications and services, says Rick Scurfield, President, NetApp APAC. "These expectations are affecting development across all technologies in storage and data management. User experiences with mobile app simplicity in a wide variety of forms has raised expectations for the usability and simplicity of data management software. And from a business standpoint, companies are demanding this simplicity because it will enable them to use less expensive resources to manage their data while giving them greater access and use of their data as a critical business asset."

Scurfield made a distinction between the use of data to run the business to data literally being the business. "With data so valuable to success, it has become the new currency of the digital age and has the potential to reshape every facet of the enterprise from business models to technology and user expectations. We’ve seen this in the emergence of companies like Uber and Airbnb, which are built around the control of a network of resources," he said.

"To make things even more interesting, we continue to see new types of data that enterprises didn’t used to think about collecting. For example, whereas we used to store and share only critical transactional data, we now store mass amounts of ancillary data surrounding transactions for deep analysis. This can include clickstream data and even data about weather and other external factors that provide market insight."

The emerging focus on data will require an ecosystem of related providers, developers, infrastructure and services, Scurfield added. Cloud-based services that provide easy access to the infrastructure needed to support innovation are one component of the ecosystem, enabling lowered barriers to entry and projects that can be set up in a day. Ultimately, NetApp sees the cloud evolve into a marketplace where usage and services are brokered and rates negotiated.

New application paradigms will also spawn as a result, similar to the way Ethernet became a networking standard and Linux, a standard operating system, Scurfield said. "We’ve seen this emerge in the form of today’s DevOps movement, where compositional programming based on micro services and mashups, open source and containerisation have taken hold. Currently, these are considered niche solutions, but as the value of data becomes more critical to business and the pace of innovation becomes an even more crucial competitive weapon, they will quickly move into the mainstream. As that happens, these technologies will further reduce friction in the integration of businesses and the movement of talent," he predicted.

Another change involves storage, which will see "a wider dynamic range" of related technologies. Scurfield named hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) as an IT architecture to watch as it simplifies infrastructure while making it more manageable.

"While the first wave of HCI solutions have done well, they have not addressed additional requirements for flexibility and scalability. Building web scale infrastructure will call for the flexibility to adapt the ratio of compute to storage according to the need, enable the upgrade of compute and storage separately, and scale easily and cost effectively," he noted.

"Expect the next wave of HCI solutions to leverage what we’ve learned from converged infrastructure to deliver web scale converged infrastructure that meets these requirements. We also see the build out of higher bandwidth networks to manage the movement of large volumes of data. On the horizon, storage technologies such as archive class storage and massive persistent memory are next in line for adoption. The rapid development of easy and accessible data management services will allow for easier deployment of these emerging technologies."

In NetApp's vision of the future, automation, data-tiering and policy-driven processes will extend data storage into a secure hybrid cloud architecture supported by global data management capabilities. "New storage opex models will evolve as software-defined everything continues to meet the flexibility demanded by enterprises, which will further accelerate their digital transformation journey," Scurfield said.
"Businesses in the transportation, fitness, entertainment and leisure industries will deliver a fresh new level of predictive solutions which are intelligent and integrates consumer preferences with real-time, competitive service offerings."