EDITOR ’ S QUESTION

JEFF WHITAKER , VP , MARKETING AND PRODUCTS , PANASAS

1 . High-performance computing environments will consolidate : We will see a consolidation of high-performance computing environments . Organisations will reevaluate their storage infrastructure and realise that one storage platform supporting one specific workload is not practical and will not scale to support the many performance environments that enterprises , universities and research institutes demand . More IT teams will see the opportunity in consolidating these environments and will voice the realities to stakeholders that the former approach is too costly and complex to manage .

2 . Hard disk drives are here to stay : The inflection point where flash overtakes hard disk drives ( HDDs ) continues to be pushed out with supply chain needs and costs . The business model is simply not there to replace hard drives . Hybrid data environments with both flash and HDDs will become more prominent as they address the high-cost challenges with flash at the same time as taking the inefficient data movement to hard drives . As such , we expect to continue to see HDDs as a significant element of the data centre for the next few years .

3 . Applications ’ need for speed will drive purpose-built , highperformance storage : In 2023 , the race will continue between compute , storage and network . The thirst for optimal performance will drive the need for parallel architectures that make traditional enterprise storage platforms irrelevant due to the sheer capacity requirements of data-intensive , high-performance applications . GPUs will continue to outgrow the performance capabilities of traditional storage systems and drive the need for purpose-built HPC storage . As such , we ’ ll see organisations leverage a parallel high-performance architecture that will give them the abilities they need from their storage system . The emergence of Quantum Computing will only intensify the need for IT infrastructure innovation .

4 . The Storage-as-a-Service trend will be accompanied by on-premises storage : Storage-as-a-Service ( STaaS ) will continue to grow in 2023 , but the industry – and organisations – will realise that STaaS means different things : a public cloud offering , an individual company delivering it , or a storage provider offering customers a service-model delivery option . We expect to see

STaaS as a public cloud offering gain greater traction in 2023 , as it is a viable option for many applications , in particular activities associated with developing , testing , science and algorithms . However , heavy CPU and GPU resources will continue to drive higher and higher performance needs from storage , which is nearly impossible to achieve from the cloud . As a result , there will also continue to be a trend of organisations keeping an element of compute and storage infrastructure on premises . Enterprises are interested in a ‘ payment over time ’ model and as such we anticipate this financial model taking off over the next one to three years . �

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