As I have written, in my previous post. In the IT Technology we can see continuous circulation. Today the trends show that, everything is moving from specialized hardware equipments to a software defined architecture. From one viewpoint, this is a great advantage, because we can use general components for every purpose, but in this happiness we need to see the dark side.
With the software defined components the overall TCO decrease, but on the other side, we latency of the components. This initiative is similar to the virtualization, but in this case, we virtualizing functionality with the software layer. This solution will gain usage in different areas, until the layer components will not form a standardized form. With the standardization, soon every vendor will realize that, we can put the standardized functionality to silicon. With a large amount of production, this will again break down the prices. I would expect a large array of storage elements which form a self organized cluster, which optimize itself with some Artificial Intelligence. This intelligence able to self heal itself, able to do deduplication, and compression, with intelligent data scanning.
Depending on the usage footprints, it will organize itself to do its best. For this it can use Extracted FeatureSet from usage samples, and Deep Learning help to predict optimal form.
I would expect more Object related storage than Block storage. This kind of Breed can serve the previously mentioned 21th Century Mainframe also.
The cells itself can use traditional disks, SSD chips, NVMe, and persistent memory. With a specialized intelligent ASIC logic, we can decrease the latency of the product, which will affect the overall response time of the system which will consume this solution.