5. Fibre Channel Begins To Fade

The three primary providers of Fibre Channel -- Emulex, QLogic and Brocade -- are no longer individual companies, and the speed of Ethernet, which is much easier to work with, is advancing by leaps and bounds.

It may be time to predict the coming end of Fibre Channel. No, it won't disappear completely in 2017, as there are still enough legacy storage arrays in the market using the connectivity solution. But 2017 will see it move to the precipice of irrelevance as customers turn away from hard disk-based storage toward all-flash storage and the cloud, neither of which requires Fibre Channel networks.