Technology Trends for 2016 - Enterprise
Each year - I take a look at the trends occurring in the enterprise space and try and predict where we are heading.
First - looking back - a few of predictions I discussed for 2015 are starting to take shape..
Hyperconverged solutions from vendors like Nutanix, Simplivity, Cohesity, ScaleIO and VMware are gaining traction. These systems provide a modular approach to compute/storage virtualization and are an excellent value. They are very quick to deploy, provide good performance and when combined with SDN solutions provide a basis for the software defined data center. I see this trend continuing for the foreseeable future and everyone from the vendors mentioned above to EMC and even Cisco have released appliances. So now it's the scramble for market share. Chances are if your planning on purchasing new compute/storage infrastructure in 2016 - you'll be looking at hyperconverged.
Next was the emergence of 40GB networking and SDN. With the new SF28 standard - there are now 10/25/40/50/100GB switches available at remarkable price points. Combine that with commodity hardware providers, ONIE multi-OS support and open networking software from VMware, Microsoft, Cumulus, BigSwitch and others - I see this model becoming the new standard for many organizations.
The trend towards local storage is also continuing. With new TLC SSD technology available - first we saw 1.92TB and 3.84TB 2.5" drives become available at price points that rival 15K HDD and recently Samsung announced a new 16TB edition. This means that in a traditional 2U server that supports 24 drives that the potential exists to have 384TB of SSD storage that could support upwards of 2M IOPS. 384TB often exceeds the size of large dedicated storage arrays with nowhere near the IOPS performance.
This also means the beginning of the end for HDD drives. Some folks will still insist on using them calling out their "reliability". But the reality is that SDD use dramatically less power and have better MTBF than any hard drive. While there will still be a price premium for high performance SSD - that premium is dropping as volume increases.
In the industry space - I called out in 2015 that I felt that EMC would be bought or merge. Well it just so happens that it came true with the announcement with Dell.
A few of the other changes I thought would occur have not. I felt there would be some sort of break up @ Cisco. While that did not occur they did recently announced a major reorg of their Engineering groups - most likely to consolidate costs and potentially the product line. I also thought that the new HP/HPE would potentially try and go private like Dell did in 2013.
Now I think the opposite will be true. While the Dell-EMC merger is still ongoing, my expectation is that most likely in 2018 or 2019 that the new organization will return to the public markets.
Finally the trend I see accelerating is Cloud. From simple VM or storage offerings through web and database PaaS offerings to sophisticated analytics, HPC, Dig Data and machine learning solutions - the pace and quality of capabilities coming from the big 2 players AWS and Azure are simply astounding.
Companies can now implement in hours or days what would have take months or even years to do previously. Combine that with the fact that you can have a global footprint, scale up/down or turn on/off at will or even on a schedule makes these solutions extremely attractive.
You are also starting to see more and more players in the Cloud space. Many hardware, consulting and specialty shops are either reselling AWS/Azure and others or building their own clouds for customers who want or need dedicated capabilities for specific vertical applications like EMR, ERP and others.
Bottom line is that many companies are evaluating their application base and where possible moving to the operational models of the Cloud versus the capital/operational models of acquiring, building and maintaining data centers. This trend will continue - especially for "modern" applications - like machine learning, IoT and large scale analytics.
Combine that with DevOps concepts like Infrastructure as Code and Automate Everything and the pace at which applications can be brought to market will accelerate.
However what this does also potentially mean is a shrinking of the IT workforce. Today many organizations still spend the majority of their IT budgets on "Keep the Lights On" (KTLO) operations. With capabilities like hyperconvergence, software defined data centers and cloud - the "more with less" trend will continue. A single cloud admin can manage hundreds if not thousands of compute, storage and networking resources. The days of the specialist roles around those disciplines are numbered.
First - looking back - a few of predictions I discussed for 2015 are starting to take shape..
Hyperconverged solutions from vendors like Nutanix, Simplivity, Cohesity, ScaleIO and VMware are gaining traction. These systems provide a modular approach to compute/storage virtualization and are an excellent value. They are very quick to deploy, provide good performance and when combined with SDN solutions provide a basis for the software defined data center. I see this trend continuing for the foreseeable future and everyone from the vendors mentioned above to EMC and even Cisco have released appliances. So now it's the scramble for market share. Chances are if your planning on purchasing new compute/storage infrastructure in 2016 - you'll be looking at hyperconverged.
Next was the emergence of 40GB networking and SDN. With the new SF28 standard - there are now 10/25/40/50/100GB switches available at remarkable price points. Combine that with commodity hardware providers, ONIE multi-OS support and open networking software from VMware, Microsoft, Cumulus, BigSwitch and others - I see this model becoming the new standard for many organizations.
The trend towards local storage is also continuing. With new TLC SSD technology available - first we saw 1.92TB and 3.84TB 2.5" drives become available at price points that rival 15K HDD and recently Samsung announced a new 16TB edition. This means that in a traditional 2U server that supports 24 drives that the potential exists to have 384TB of SSD storage that could support upwards of 2M IOPS. 384TB often exceeds the size of large dedicated storage arrays with nowhere near the IOPS performance.
This also means the beginning of the end for HDD drives. Some folks will still insist on using them calling out their "reliability". But the reality is that SDD use dramatically less power and have better MTBF than any hard drive. While there will still be a price premium for high performance SSD - that premium is dropping as volume increases.
In the industry space - I called out in 2015 that I felt that EMC would be bought or merge. Well it just so happens that it came true with the announcement with Dell.
A few of the other changes I thought would occur have not. I felt there would be some sort of break up @ Cisco. While that did not occur they did recently announced a major reorg of their Engineering groups - most likely to consolidate costs and potentially the product line. I also thought that the new HP/HPE would potentially try and go private like Dell did in 2013.
Now I think the opposite will be true. While the Dell-EMC merger is still ongoing, my expectation is that most likely in 2018 or 2019 that the new organization will return to the public markets.
Finally the trend I see accelerating is Cloud. From simple VM or storage offerings through web and database PaaS offerings to sophisticated analytics, HPC, Dig Data and machine learning solutions - the pace and quality of capabilities coming from the big 2 players AWS and Azure are simply astounding.
Companies can now implement in hours or days what would have take months or even years to do previously. Combine that with the fact that you can have a global footprint, scale up/down or turn on/off at will or even on a schedule makes these solutions extremely attractive.
You are also starting to see more and more players in the Cloud space. Many hardware, consulting and specialty shops are either reselling AWS/Azure and others or building their own clouds for customers who want or need dedicated capabilities for specific vertical applications like EMR, ERP and others.
Bottom line is that many companies are evaluating their application base and where possible moving to the operational models of the Cloud versus the capital/operational models of acquiring, building and maintaining data centers. This trend will continue - especially for "modern" applications - like machine learning, IoT and large scale analytics.
Combine that with DevOps concepts like Infrastructure as Code and Automate Everything and the pace at which applications can be brought to market will accelerate.
However what this does also potentially mean is a shrinking of the IT workforce. Today many organizations still spend the majority of their IT budgets on "Keep the Lights On" (KTLO) operations. With capabilities like hyperconvergence, software defined data centers and cloud - the "more with less" trend will continue. A single cloud admin can manage hundreds if not thousands of compute, storage and networking resources. The days of the specialist roles around those disciplines are numbered.
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