IT Trends for 2016 – Containers, Clouds, and Flash, oh my!

cxi over 7 years ago 2 minute read time

Wow, can you believe it? 2016 is almost over, the holidays are here I didn’t even get you anything! It’s been a bit of a wild rollercoaster of a year through consolidation, commoditization, and collaboration!

I’m sure you have some absolute favorite trends or notable things which have occurred here throughout 2016. Here are some that in particular have been a pretty recurring trend throughout the year.

Companies going private such as Solarwinds (closed in February), DellEMC (closed in September)
Companies buying other companies and consolidating industry like Avago buying Broadcom (Closed Q1), Brocade buying Ruckus (Closed Q3), Broadcom buying Brocade (Initiated in October)
Or companies divesting of assets like Dell selling off SonicWall and Quest, and Broadcom selling off Brocade’s IP division

Alright so that’s some of the rollercoaster at least a small snapshot of it, and the impact those decisions will have on practitioners like you and I only time will tell (I promise some of those will be GREAT and some of those, not so much!)

But what else, what else?! Some items I’ve very recently discussed include.

Containers starting to hit the mainstream!
- Why aren’t we using Containers, and other questions CIOs ask when coming back from a tech conference
Clouds starting to hit the mainstream!
- Cloud in practice. Practical cloud experiences from IT pros to IT pros
Flash starting to hit the mainstream!

All three of these net-net benefit in the end really means that we will continue to see better technology, with deeper investment and ultimately (potentially) lower costs!

On the subject of Flash though if you haven’t been tracking the Density profiles have been insane this year alone and that trend is only continuing with further adoption and better price economics with technology like NVMe. I particularly love this image as it reflects the shrinking footprint of the data center while reflecting our inevitable need for more.

Moores Law of Storage.png

This is hardly everything that happened in 2016 but these are particular items which are close to my heart and respectively my infrastructure. I will give a hearty congratulation to this being the 16^th official “year of vdi” a title we continue to grant it yet continues to fail to fulfill on its promises.

Though with 2016 closing quickly on our heels there are a few areas you’ll want to be on the watch for in 2017!

Look for Flash Storage to get even cheaper, and even denser
Look to see even more competition in the Cloud space from Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS and Google GCP
Look to Containers to become something you MIGHT actually use on a regular basis and more rationally than the very obscure use-cases promoted within organizations
Look to vendors to provide more of their applications and objects as Containers (EMC did this with their ESRS (Secure Remote Support)
Obviously 2017 WILL be the Year of VDI… so be sure to bake a cake
And strangely with the exception of pricing economics making adoption of 10GigE+ and Wireless wave2 we’ll see a lot more of the same as we saw this year, maybe even some retraction in hardware innovation
Oh and don’t forget, more automation, more DevOps, more “better, easier, smarter”

But enough about me and my predictions, what were some of your favorite and notable trends of 2016 and what are you looking to see coming forward looking to 2017?

And if I don’t get a chance to… Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year to ya’ll!