| | January 201519CIOReviewJust as most customers were reluctant to bet on a single vendor for their on-premise IT, they will choose to work with multiple cloud providers. Avoidance of lock-in, leverage in negotiations, or simply a desire for choice will drive them to seek a hybrid cloud that does not lock them in to any single provider. SaaS vendors who offer no way to extract data will suffer. PaaS layers that only run in a single cloud will see less usage. Software technologies that can be deployed on premise and in a range of clouds will find favor with customers thinking strategically about their model for IT.Software Defined Storage Will Build a Bridge between Public and Private CloudsSoftware Defined Storage (SDS), with the ability to be deployed on different hardware and supporting rich automation capabilities, will extend its reach into cloud deployments and build a data fabric that spans premise and public clouds. SDS will provide a means for applications to access data uniformly across clouds and simplifies the data management aspects of moving existing applications to the cloud. SDS for object storage will bridge on-premise and cloud object repositories. The storage efficiencies in some software-defined storage offerings, such as Cloud ONTAP, also reduce the cost of moving data to and from the public cloud, and storing active data in the public cloud for long periods of time.Docker Replaces Hypervisors as the Container of Choice for Scale-Out ApplicationsAs new applications for SaaS or large-scale enterprise use cases are written using the scale-out microservices model, Docker application containers have proven to be more resource efficient than VMs with a complete OS. All major VM orchestration systems now support Docker and we will see the emergence of a robust ecosystem for data management and other surrounding services in 2015. | | January 201519CIOReviewHyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) products are becoming the new compute server with Direct-Attached Storage (DAS)"Hyper-Converged Infrastructure is the New Compute ServerHyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) products are becoming the new compute server with Direct-Attached Storage (DAS). Traditional data center compute consists of blades or boxes in racks that have dedicated CPUs, memory, I/O and network connections, and run dozens of VMs. HCI such as VMware's EVO allows local DAS to be shared across a few servers, making the unit of compute more resilient, while broadly shared data is accessed over the LAN or SAN. Starting in 2015, the emergence of solid state storage, broader adoption of Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) network protocols, and new interconnects will drive a compute model where the cores, memory, and IOPs storage will be integrated in a low-latency fabric that will make them behave as a single rack-scale system.
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