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Scott: It's that time of year again, time for 2019 predictions. With the expected growth in public cloud usage, all-flash adoption, and the rise of analytics, artificial intelligence, and IoT, all impacting IT environments, here are some of the data storage related trends I expect to see in 2019.

First, I expect more companies to bring the workload back from the public cloud. Last year, we identified that 41% of businesses brought at least one workload back from public cloud infrastructure services on premises. These moves are nonindictment of the public cloud, rather the cloud, as we should all know by now, offers a wealth of benefits.

These moves are often the result of a lack of due diligence prior to cloud adoption, such as not modifying the workload or not understanding the specific performance or data sensitivity requirements. With cloud adoption poised to accelerate even faster, more cloud excitement, unfortunately, often translates into less due diligence, which will mean more costly missteps.

These moves may eventually become less frequent over time, but I expect it to get a little worse before it gets better. And second, 2019 will be the year of NVMe over Fabrics, and I expect NVMe over Fibre Channel adoption to outpace NVME over Ethernet starting this year. Many of the leading Fibre Channel vendors have already integrated NVMe over Fabrics support into their existing platforms.

And growing interest in NVMe over TCP complicates the NVMe over Ethernet decisions. Do I go with an RDMA-based protocol, such as RoCE, and buying new interconnects, or do I go with NVMe over TCP? And what are the performance impacts? Questions such as these will likely slow NVMe over Ethernet adoption relative to NVMe over Fibre Channel.

And finally, a significant percentage of analytics, AI, and IoT workload will miss their goals due to a lack of an adequate metadata handling solution. File data has been growing for decades, and modern data storage infrastructure has become increasingly disaggregated, with the rise of the public cloud and the edge.

Finding the right data simply takes too long, and that lost time diminishes the value of analytics and AI projects. The solution to this problem has long been thought to be hidden in metadata handling, but the ideal solution has been elusive so far. I expect addressing metadata handling to move to the forefront of IT priorities for the larger, more transformed businesses in 2019.

This year should be an exciting year for IT, and I, for one, am looking for what 2019 brings.