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Futurology: what does 2016 hold for the Cloud sector?

Editorial Type: Analysis     Date: 01-2016    Views: 10959      








An expert panel of industry leaders and technology visionaries offer us their insights on the year ahead for the Cloud

Whenever you ask half a dozen different people what will happen over the next 12 months, you are going to get half a dozen very different answers - but that's half the fun of our annual round-up of predictions, warnings and crystal ball gazing for 2016. We asked some of the leading names in the Cloud sector to summarise what they felt would be the key trends across the market in the next year. You may not like it all, you may not agree with any of it, but you'll definitely find some interesting viewpoints.

Dave Wright of SolidFire sees public Cloud as an area of major growth this year: "Ovum reported that 80% of global enterprises will be using IaaS by 2016. We've seen several enterprise IT vendors buy Public Clouds (IBM/SoftLayer and EMC/Virtustream), while others have shut down their public Cloud efforts (HP and Dell). Any large IT vendor that doesn't derive a meaningful amount of its revenue from the public Cloud in 2016 is going to simply be running after a bus that left the station a long time ago."

Wright also sees 2016 as the year when OpenStack comes of age: "Enterprises as well as the IT industry are hungry for an open, cross-platform integration technology to help bring new Cloud computing technologies together in a vendor-neutral manner. OpenStack is showing increasing maturity with 60% of deployments in production compared to just 32% less than two years ago. In 2016, OpenStack is going to drive a separation between storage architectures designed from the ground up for a scale-out, multi-tenant Cloud and those dragged in from the legacy siloed data centre."

TROUBLE IN STORE
Storage technologies are of course central to any business' strategy for increased agility, as Fujitsu's David Histon comments: "All Flash Arrays are quickly giving way to the flexibility and increased consolidation benefits of Hybrid Arrays. This allows customers the flexibility and cost savings of being able to manage and configure all their storage performance requirements (high to low) from a single storage array. This can help customers meet the traditionally opposing demands from the business of increasing agility and reducing cost. The big trend aligned with this is 'Hybrid'. Customers are in the process of making their infrastructure investments for the next 5-7 years (as this is how long hardware is being sweated), so they are looking to embrace technologies which allow them to get Cloud ready. Much the same way as we had 'HD Ready' in TV's before Full HD became mainstream, we are seeing the increased promotion of 'Cloud Ready' technologies across the data centre. This allows customers to believe that they will be in a position to easily move their data centre into the Cloud as their comfort level with this kind of approach increases."

Such an approach is not without it dangers though, Histon concludes: "This can be a very risky approach if customers are not adopting Open Standards or Open Source, as they could end up backing the wrong 'Cloud Ready'/Hybrid technology, and end up stuck in a proprietary technology island."

SimpliVity's Katie Curtin Mestre sees even bigger disruption ahead for traditional storage businesses: "One of the main drivers behind Dell / EMC is to break down traditional siloes and to address this downward trend with more joined up solutions. So why is there an impending Apocalypse for traditional shared storage? First, most applications simply do not require it. Applications that are 'born in the cloud' are architected to deliver resiliency at the application layer, and can work quite happily on a JBOD-based architecture on commodity servers with flash drives for performance. Traditional enterprise applications, like Microsoft Exchange, OLTP, and even newer workloads like VDI, run perfectly well on new hyperconverged infrastructure platforms. Second, in a virtualised world, the architecture of traditional shared storage is obsolete. An architecture built on the concept of a LUN no longer makes sense in a world where the majority of applications run on VMs. Virtualisation unlocked all of this great new functionality, like the ability to move VMs between servers, but it was still not practical in many cases when a single LUN could have multiple VMs associated to it. The reasons why holding storage captive in your server was seen as bad no longer apply in a software-defined world, where infrastructure optimized for VM environments can be built on commodity x86 servers. Third, traditional shared storage is too expensive to procure, deploy, and maintain. According to Wikibon, storage accounts for 37% of the CAPEX budget and 62% of the OPEX budget at many enterprises. Except for the people who are responsible for the care and feeding of traditional shared storage, most folks in IT are just plain sick and tired of it. It is no wonder that most IT leaders understand that one of the biggest opportunities for CAPEX and OPEX savings comes from reducing their investment in traditional shared storage and associated infrastructure like the SAN."



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