SAN/vSAN Centric, ignores reality
This report is too SAN/VSAN Centric, while I agree the current SAN model will shrink, vSAN is not the main alternative.
vSAN is used for co-located storage (VM images, app data, ..) and with new technologies like dedup, containers (Docker image is only 200MB vs 10GB vDisk), relative amount of server co-located storage and block storage will go down.
The real hyper storage growth is in shared unstructured data, i.e. IoT, Video streams, Logs, BigData, .. such storage is not using any SAN/VSAN protocol, and cannot be co-located with app cluster (vSAN), simply since: a. any app in different compute cluster/region or even mobile device may want to access it, b. it grows in rate >100% per year and adding servers/cpu/mem for the sake of adding Petabytes is not so economical nor dense or power efficient enough.
Its enough to look at the hyper-scale titans, which don’t grow their vSAN significantly as the post/report may imply, but rather grow exponentially and invest most of their energy in shared data-lakes and data services supporting object, scale-out NAS, and No-SQL models.
If hyper-scale trends are an indication to where the Enterprise will go, Enterprise data-lakes, next gen object storage, and scale-out NAS will probably store more data than vSANs (hosting small Docker images and private app data).
Yaron
SDSBlog.com