The pandemic has accelerated digital transformation:

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The fabric of our society in 2020 would have looked much different without cloud-derived digital services including online shopping, virtual meetings, and tele-health connections. The very research that delivered therapies and vaccines in record time were enabled by massive data crunching in the data center. These technologies became the foundation of our new normal, and all of the sudden, things like AI self-learning models look far more approachable. CIOs’ risk tolerance has changed because they’ve had to deploy more nascent technology to keep their businesses afloat, and this will have a rippling effect across enterprises in the year ahead.

In 2021, the prevalence of remote work—even post-pandemic—will continue accelerating capabilities in the cloud. Companies will look to create preparedness for a new normal whether it be more IT solutions for a flexible workforce, larger data stores to fuel continued growth of online commerce, or resilient IT systems to address any future health care crises. This will drive unprecedented demand for agile IT infrastructure, multi-cloud solutions and pervasive connectivity to power edge-to-cloud use cases. While we see great opportunity for memory and storage to fuel increasingly data-centric cloud services, we will also see a rise in data center operators evaluating disaggregated, composable systems to better scale for coming enterprise demands.

More pressure for an energy-efficient cloud: The move toward composable infrastructure will be critical in reducing overprovisioned resources, and thus, mitigating the rising environmental impact of IT. Information and communication technology is already predicted to use 20% of the world’s electricity by 2030. As companies look to incorporate sustainability into business strategy and reduce OpEx for compute-intensive workloads such as AI and high-performance computing, we’ll see escalating demand for energy-efficient architectures.

Boundaries between memory and storage will blur: 2021 is going to see AI-as-a-service become mainstream, intelligence migrate to the edge, and 5G come to life. This is going to propel fundamental changes in the way server systems are architected. Memory will extend into multiple infrastructure pools—and will become a shared resource. And the lines between storage and memory will blur. You’ll no longer think “DRAM for memory and NAND for storage.” Instead, faster NAND will create the ability to use it as memory, and applications will grow in their sophistication to utilize resourcing in innovative ways. In 2021, we’ll also see enterprises seeking new kinds of solutions such as storage-class memory and memory virtualization to further unlock the value of AI and exploding volumes of data.

Note: This article is authored by Raj Hazra, Micron Senior Vice President of Emerging Products, Corporate Strategy and Communications

This is a partnered post.

First Published:Feb 5, 2021 6:36 PM IST