Looking Forward to 2018….

2017 was the year of virtualization, the days of buying dedicated hardware is coming to a close. and I can only see this continuing as the power of virtualization is clear for all to see, dedicated task orientated servers are relics from the past being phased out in all sectors.

Virtualization and the resilience and IT agility it brings are undeniable and being widely embraced.

Hardware is becoming more and more unified, with compute and storage solutions being sold as comodities, with virtualization providing the functional granularity and separation of servers and services.

Recent Developments such as Scale Computing’s HC3 Unity will start to shift the paradigm from in house private clouds to public cloud allowing public cloud to be leveraged to fill performance gaps in peak load situations – using Hybrid cloud technology, Which for me is a very exciting prospect, negating the need for over-provisioning available compute resources as organizations can worry less about peek load than average load when buying compute hardware.   Knowing that their private cloud infrastructure has seamless integration with the public cloud. What IT department inst going to jump at the chance of spending less on hardware and gaining redundancy in the deal!

“Throughout 2017 we have seen many organizations focus on implementing a 100% cloud focused model and there has been a push for complete adoption of the cloud. There has been a debate around on-premises and cloud, especially when it comes to security, performance and availability, with arguments both for and against. But the reality is that the pendulum stops somewhere in the middle. In 2018 and beyond, the future is all about simplifying hybrid IT. The reality is it’s not on-premises versus the cloud. It’s on-premises and the cloud. Using hyperconverged solutions to support remote and branch locations and making the edge more intelligent, in conjunction with a hybrid cloud model, organizations will be able to support highly changing application environments” –said Jason Collier, co-founder at Scale Computing.

“This will be the year of making hybrid cloud a reality. In 2017, companies dipped their toes into a combination of managed service providers (MSP), public cloud and on-premises infrastructure. In 2018, organizations will look to leverage hybrid clouds fororchestration and data mobility to establish edge data centers that take advantage of MSPs with large bandwidth into public clouds, ultimately bringing mission critical data workloads closer to front-end applications that live in the public cloud. Companies will also leverage these capabilities to bring test or QA workloads to burst in a MSP or public cloud. Having the ability to move data back and forth from MSPs, public clouds and on-premises infrastructure will also enable companies to take advantage of the costs structure that hybrid cloud provides.” – Rob Strechay, SVP Product, Zerto

The Big challenge for IT admins now is designing their virtual infrastructure around their organizational needs. for me there are 2 main challeges to this, designing the virtual networks to optimize performance of virtualized services, ensuring the virtualized servers can comunicate with their storage effectively, and that IO operations are optimized for their needs, across enterprise storage.

2018 Must continue this trend,  but this will bring its own challenges, in order for the hybrid cloud to be able to offer true seamless integration of private and public clouds, the performance critical services such as databases are hosted predominately in-house with optimized storeage

“From a storage perspective, I think what will surprise many is that in 2018 we will see the majority of organizations move away from convergence and instead focus on working with specialist vendors to get the expertise they need. The cloud will be a big part of this, especially as we’re going to see a major shift in public cloud adoption. I believe public cloud implementation has reached a peak, and we will even see a retreat from the public cloud due to hidden costs coming to light and the availability, management and security concerns.”  – Gary Watson, Founder and CTO of Nexsan

“2018 will be the year that DR moves from being a secondary issue to a primary focus. The last 12 months have seen mother nature throw numerous natural disasters at us, which has magnified the need for a formal DR strategy. The challenge is that organizations are struggling to find DR solutions that work simply at scale. It’s become somewhat of the white whale to achieve, but there are platforms that are designed to scale and protect workloads wherever they are – on-premises or in the public cloud.” – Chris Colotti, Field CTO at Tintri

Disaster Recovery is another great benifit to the the hybrid cloud, you can have an exact replica of your in-house cloud on the public cloud ready to failover at a moments notice, Natural Disasters need not take down public facing services, and must be taken seriously in this ever changing world…

It’s 2018 and computers are fundamental to the core of buisiness worldwide, theres no debate and its been so for a long time. but that doesnt necessarity mean its being done in the best way…

“In 2018, we will continue to hear a lot about companies taking on this journey called ‘digital transformation.’ The part that we are going to have to start grappling with is that there is no metric for knowing when we get there – when a company is digitally transformed. The reality is that it is a process, with phases and gates – just like software development itself. A parallel that is extremely relevant. In fact, digital transformation in 2017, and looking ahead to 2018, is all about software. The ‘bigger, better, faster, cheaper’ notion of the 90s, largely focused around hardware, is gone. Hardware is commoditized, disposable and simply an access point to software. The focus is squarely on software and unlimited data storage to push us forward. Now the pressure is on the companies building software to continue to lead the way and push us forward.” – Bob Davis, CMO at Plutora

“The total volume of traffic generated by IoT is expected to reach 600 Zettabytes by 2020, that’s 275X more traffic than is projected to be generated by end users in private datacenter applications. With such a deluge of traffic traversing WANs and being processed and stored in the cloud, edge computing — in all of its forms — will emerge as an essential part of the WAN edge in 2018.” – Todd Krautkremer, CMO, Cradlepoint

“As enterprise data continues to accumulate at an exponential rate, large organizations are finally getting a handle on how to collect, store, access and analyze it. While that’s a tremendous achievement, simply gathering and reporting on data is only half of the battle in the ultimate goal of unleashing that data as a transformative business force. Artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities will make 2018 the year when enterprises officially enter the ‘information-driven’ era, an era in which actionable information and insights are provided to individual employees for specific tasks where and when they need it. This transformation will finally fulfill the promise of the information-driven enterprise, allowing organizations and employees to achieve unprecedented efficiency and innovation.” – Scott Parker, Senior Product Manager, Sinequa

Now My Phd was in molecular informatics, and our research group was dedicated to providing novel aplications for computing, processing data in order to extract principle factors, and this to me seems to have strong parallels with this concept of Digital Transfomation and will be something i follow closely this year..

Happy 2018 to you all,

Thanks for reading

Tchau for now…

Phil