2015 was a particularly tumultuous year for the storage industry, and by all accounts, 2016 will witness the continued transformation of the modern data center—a transformation that is being created by the need for business agility and fueled by software. Enterprise storage is undergoing a massive "sea change" in moving from traditional systems to new deployment models and architectures. We highlight four innovative approaches that are rapidly gaining traction: software-defined storage, cloud storage and data protection, flash and other emerging high-performance storage mediums, and hyper-converged storage/server/networking systems.