2017: A Strengthening of Continuing Trend
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Original Post: http://vmblog.com/archive/2016/12/20/scale-computing-2017-predictions-a-strengthening-of-continuing-trend.aspx
At Scale Computing, we specialize in hyperconverged infrastructure. These predictions, therefore, are heavily influenced by our view of the virtualization, cloud, and hardware infrastructure markets especially as they relate to our target customer (small to mid-size companies). We see a strengthening of continuing trends that are reshaping how customers are viewing virtualization and cloud and how the market is reacting to these trends.
Here are the predictions:
Rising Adoption Rates for Hyperconverged Infrastructure
Hyperconverged Infrastructure will become increasingly popular as an alternative to traditional virtualization architecture composed of separate vendors for storage, servers, and hypervisor. IT shops will increasingly move to shed the complexity of managing components of infrastructure in silos and adopt simpler hyperconverged infrastructure solutions as a way to streamline IT operations. There may likely be a much sharper rise in adoption of hyperconverged infrastructure in the SMB market where the simplicity (requiring less management) can have a bigger budget impact.
Increased Commoditization of the Hypervisor
Virtualization will continue moving further down the path of commoditization with movement toward licensing-free virtualization. As cloud and hyperconverged platforms continue including hypervisor as a feature of an infrastructure solution rather than as premium software product, the desire to pay for hypervisor directly will decrease. Rather than fight for an on-premises, traditional 3-2-1 deployment model, traditional hypervisor vendors will look to create alliances with public cloud providers to maintain their stronghold on the hypervisor market. Beyond 2017, this will eventually lose out to licensing-free virtualization options as the management software and ecosystems around these hypervisors catch up.
Increased Commoditization of Disaster Recovery and Backup
The trend of including disaster recovery and backup capabilities as features of infrastructure and software solutions will continue to rise. Customers will further lose their appetite for 3rd party solutions when they can achieve adequate protection and meet SLAs through built-in DR/Backup and DRaaS solutions. Customers will be expecting more and more that DR/backup be available as a feature especially when looking at cloud and hyperconverged solutions.
Increased Hybridization of Cloud
IT shops are already moving toward hybrid cloud models by adopting cloud-based applications like Office 365, Salesforce, and cloud-based DRaaS solutions in addition to their on-prem infrastructure and applications. Whether or not these shops adopt a "true" private cloud/hybrid cloud approach, they will be a part of a trend that will solidify the hybrid cloud/on-prem architecture as the norm rather than going all-in one way or another.
Fast Adoption of NVMe for SSD Storage
As more storage is implemented as all flash or hybrid flash, NVMe adoption will increase rapidly in 2017 in storage solutions. Flash storage is becoming a key factor in increasing storage performance and SSDs are becoming as commoditized as spinning disks. Big data is putting pressure on storage and compute platforms to deliver faster and faster performance. NVMe looks very promising for providing better SSD performance and will be a big part of computing performance enhancement in 2017. Adoption in the SMB will lag other segments due to price sensitivity and a general lack of high-performance needs, but adoption in other areas of the market will pave the way for the SMB to take advantage of the increased performance in future years.
About the Author
As a founder, Jason is responsible for the evangelism marketing of the company. Previously, Jason was VP of Technical Operations at Corvigo where he oversaw sales engineering, technical support, internal IT and datacenter operations. Prior to Corvigo, Jason was VP of Information Technology and Infrastructure at Radiate. There he architected and oversaw the deployment of the entire Radiate ad-network infrastructure, scaling it from under one million transactions per month when he started to more than 300 million at its peak.
