IT Getting Very “Cloudy”

 This article was authored by Noam Shendar, VP business development, Zadara Storage Ltd. on vmblog.com. He has over 15 years of experience with enterprise technologies including at LSI Corporation, MIPS Technologies, entertainment technology startup iBlast, and Intel.   
 
It’s that time of the year again, when we look back at the technologies that brought disruptive changes to the storage industry, before picking out the emergingtrends that will define the year to come.
 
If last year’s predictions pointed to enterprise cloud adoption, cloud storage price drops and the massive expansion of as-a-service offerings, next year I think we’re going to see a great maturing of this cloud services business model, as traditional IT models begin to wane.
 
Blurring between cloud and data centre
Organisations are managing data across multiple physical tiers, including their on-premises data centres, colocation facilities and the public cloud. Today, these tiers host different types of workloads determined by security, performance, management and budget needs. Over the coming year we’ll see the differences between these tiers shrink, as more efficient, elastic, and responsive architectures will be adopted beyond the public cloud, while the cloud will deliver more robust enterprise services. Moreover, the administration of these tiers will become dramatically simplified with solutions enabling a single management paradigm across all locations.
 
IT equipment ownership begins to decline
Albeit slowly, ownership of IT equipment, formerly the predominant IT standard, is in decline, in favour of as-a-service models. As organisations contend with growing capacity demands and a need for data centre infrastructure refresh, as-a-service models will continue to be the primary choice for vendors and the channel alike. Start-ups will avoid burdensome CapEx investments of that come with purchasing IT hardware, while existing IT departments will seek to get rid of maintenance headachesassociated with hardware management in favour of OpEx-led infrastructure both on, and off-premises.
 
ROI and TCO lead IT decision making
Staying within budget is no longer enough. Business stakeholders want to see the ROI of every IT investment by adopting a strategic use of cloud services to better understand expenditures and the resulting benefits. As such, we’ll see organisations adopting more sophisticated charge-back models to lift the fog off their expenses and analyse ROI and the TCO of their hardware and software infrastructure. Understanding how departments operate and the investment required to meet their IT needs will provide new insight into TCO and lead to a more strategic approach to IT.
 
Petabytes on a shoestring – more solutions using commodity hardware
With the rapid growth of data, costs and budgets gain an even higher priority. As resources are squeezed harder, any technology that makes the data centre more efficient will see increased adoption. In 2015, we will see more innovative solutions emerge that are built on commodity hardware and use low-cost interfaces to achieve greater density and increased performance at lower costs. As web-scale demands hit enterprises, organizations will follow the lead of the web’s giants who are building lower-cost solutions from commodity components without compromising reliability or performance. Even traditional vendors see the changing landscape, and are speaking about agnostic solutions.

Capacity to become an IT enabler rather than a constraint  
Storage-as-a-service and big data analytics will enable IT to contend with the ensuing tsunami of data. Rather than constrain IT development, application deployment, or responsiveness (as often happens today), the growth of capacity will drive more extensive database testing, new applications, greater value from data and ultimately, increased IT responsiveness. This will result in a stronger alignment of IT infrastructures with corporate goals.
 
Storage tiering in (not just to) the cloud
In reality, data tiering has been difficult for many organisations to fully achieve, often due to the lack of physical resources needed to accommodate each tier. With new storage options and enterprise-grade features in the cloud (such as SSD-powered services and mission-critical HA capabilities) organizations will now be able to move more applications to the cloud and take advantage of even greater cost efficiencies, employing tiering techniques within the cloud itself.