Internet of Things (IoT), similar to Cloud, has been talked about for over a decade with primetime upon us. Three technology trends are providing strong tail winds:

Ubiquitous Internet Connectivity, allowing for the ever-increasing number of WiFi, IoT devices to effectively communicate.
Cloud Platforms providing next generation IoT services. This gives IoT developers the ability to focus on their product, customer experience and go to market, not backend infrastructure.
Smart Phones and the Post-PC era, accelerating the declining price curve of compute, WiFi connectivity and Flash (more on this to appear in a separate post)

“By 2020, more than three-quarters of the S&P 500 will be companies that we have not heard of yet.” -Yale Professor R. Foster

This quote, crystalizes the amount of innovation which will happen over the course of the next half-decade; much of this will be attributed to the growth and maturity of IoT.

As with all technology trends, they do not occur in isolation and are often interconnected. We witnessed this with Cloud through its connection and reliance upon systems of record. In the past when compute was a single application server and client access was a PC or laptop, availability and uptime was best achieved through hardening the hardware at the server/infrastructure level. Today, compute is delivered through a collection of many applications and services which come together in the form of the right information, at the right time and in the palm of my hand. From an IT management point of view, the availability of each and every component at a synchronous point in time is essential, without this the service or application would simply not work. The number of dependent applications and services are growing each day and IoT will accelerate this growth.

Due to this high level of interdependence, non-disruptive Operations is essential. When speaking with Customers and Service Providers, simple Infrastructure upgrades require 2 year FTEs to manage and coordinate downtime windows. When you add Cloud and IoT to the equation, this change control process grows exponentially.

NetApp Data ONTAP Operating System delivers Non-Disruptive Operations with a modular, multiprotocol, truly unified storage for open systems. This delivers the equivalent availability of high-end monolithic storage frames of the past, adding the rich enterprise data management feature set with the ability to, on the fly, modularly add on and replace Storage Capacity and Compute with no data availability disruption.

In a world where Data and Application interdependencies are ever increasing and the success of a given compute service is unknown, being able to modularly scale while providing Non-disruptive Operations across the board for all applications requiring data is truly a game changing and transformative.

Look out for my next blog post covering the Data Fabric uniquely enabling the data lifecycle of IoT ecosystems.