The New Year holiday is a time for reflection and, more importantly, a time to look to the future. With that in mind, here are my predictions for the IT industry in the coming year.
Enterprises Will Shift to “Software-Defined Storage First” Policies
As enterprises increasingly shift toward hybrid and multi-cloud environments, traditional hardware-based storage systems no longer meet the agility, scalability, manageability, and cost-efficiency demands of modern IT infrastructures.
Software-defined storage (SDS), which runs on standard servers and networks, decouples data from the underlying hardware, offers unmatched flexibility in deploying, managing, and scaling storage resources across on-premises data centers and cloud environments.
For many hardware and data center refresh and data center consolidation projects, SDS is becoming an option of first resort. In 2025, we will continue seeing a transition toward fully-automated, software-defined storage solutions with an emphasis on performance, security, manageability, API access, and cost reduction across larger and more complex infrastructure projects.
AI Will Continue to Proliferate
In 2025, AI use will continue to increase across all industries, bringing new opportunities and challenges. Integration of AI into storage systems will be especially transformative, with AI-powered solutions becoming increasingly common for optimizing performance, enhancing security, and ensuring data storage reliability. This increase in AI workloads will lead to a surge in demand for high-performance storage solutions that can support the data-intensive requirements, including large language models (LLMs), machine learning model training and real-time data analytics. This will increase the requirements enterprises demand from data storage technologies in order to handle AI’s specific needs for speed, scalability, and overall efficiency.
2025 Will be the Year of the Move Away From Broadcom VMware
Enterprises are increasingly moving away from traditional virtualization platforms, like Broadcom VMware, to open-source, no vendor lock-in cloud management / orchestration platforms. This will lead to a higher adoption of the leading solutions in this area such as CloudStack, Proxmox, OpenNebula, OpenStack, and Kubernetes – all of which are based on KVM-based virtualization on Linux. Even other commercial or proprietary alternatives, like RedHat OpenShift and HPE Morpheus, are KVM-based.
KVM is the default hypervisor for the majority of the large-scale cloud-native companies in industries like SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, e-commerce, and similar offerings. Now it is becoming the preferred hypervisor in many traditional enterprises due to its openness, performance, capabilities, flexibility, and wide usage.
In 2025, we’ll see many more organizations of all types increasingly adopting cloud-native orchestration platforms like the ones listed above. This trend is being driven by requirements to reduce cost, optimize operational efficiency and profit margins, increase performance, and reduce vendor lock-in.
Come With Us Into the New Year
While StorPool had some great achievements in 2024, 2025 looks to be even more exciting. Look for upcoming announcements of all the events we’ll be attending, even higher performance, deeper integration with cloud management platforms, new solutions, and some unique new features. Keep informed about what we’re working on by following us on any of our social accounts listed at the bottom of this page, or if you’d like to learn more about some of our use cases, check out under “Solutions” in the navigation bar at the top of the page.
And Happy New Year!