The disruption of storage with the rapid innovation of Flash technology and software architectures has fundamentally changed the face of the industry.
Consolidation and mergers have been rampant and will no doubt establish a new set of leaders over the next 3-5 years. This was best punctuated with Dell closing a 60 billion dollar merger with EMC last week.
This rapid innovation cycle with Flash technologies has also led to an explosion of storage products and architectures (more on this later) and poses a significant challenge for the IT professional in rationalizing “what’s the best recipe” for rolling out the next generation infrastructure. To compound the problem, a sizable portion of enterprise workloads are also migrating to the public cloud (expected to be 50% by 2021 – VMW 2016 keynote) posing yet another additional set of choices based on the cloud service provider selected by the firm.
Contrast this with my first experience deploying enterprise storage (circa 1997) as part of the infrastructure roll-out and transformation to a 100% eBusiness corporation. As you may well imagine, the scope of this deployment at this leading semi-conductor firm was colossal (Web front end, ERP, EAI, ETL, B2B, Content management, Data Warehouse, Security, etc). Central to the enterprise blueprint was the company’s data management strategy and the deployment of a scalable and secure storage infrastructure. However, it was not hard to make an architectural and product decision given the mandate to move away from the mainframe (IBM/DB2). We rolled out a fiber channel SAN infrastructure consisting of “7 global SAN Islands” reflecting our workload segmentation characteristics based on RPO/RTO, performance and security objectives
Fast- forward to 2016 - what does it take for a CIO to deliver a next generation infrastructure for a fast growing multi-billion dollar enterprise? The complexity of the task along with the array (no pun intended!) of choices is daunting. Here is a growing list of architectures/product segments all vying for a dis-proportionate share of the the $37 billion (2015 IDC) enterprise storage systems market and the CIO mindshare.
1. Traditional and/or Hybrid storage arrays
2. All Flash Arrays
3. Hyper converged (HCI) and traditional Converged infrastructure
4. PCIe/NVMe extreme performance appliances (4-6u and blade form factors)
5. Emerging NVM fabric (RDMA/IWARP) Rack scale solutions
6. SDS (software defined storage)
7. Intelligent IO offload products coupled with # 1 - #6.
8. …
The IT professional in 2016 has to grapple with cost-effective choices that can be presented to the C-Suite as part of a hybrid cloud strategy and not just be “sold” on the merits of the next “killer” product. To address this there will be a need for a workload <=> product /architecture mapping model that best fits the performance, agility and tco needs of the customer. Most large IT shops have their own benchmarking environments to wring this out on a case by case basis and define their course. However this exercise is destined to get much more complex with m-products x n-cloud service providers in the decision matrix. Perhaps there is an easier way!
To mediate this, the eco system needs to offer a much simpler and unified menu for IT so we do not re-create the very complexity that we are trying to get out of in the migration journey to a cross-cloud landscape as next generation IT.
Consolidation and mergers have been rampant and will no doubt establish a new set of leaders over the next 3-5 years. This was best punctuated with Dell closing a 60 billion dollar merger with EMC last week.
This rapid innovation cycle with Flash technologies has also led to an explosion of storage products and architectures (more on this later) and poses a significant challenge for the IT professional in rationalizing “what’s the best recipe” for rolling out the next generation infrastructure. To compound the problem, a sizable portion of enterprise workloads are also migrating to the public cloud (expected to be 50% by 2021 – VMW 2016 keynote) posing yet another additional set of choices based on the cloud service provider selected by the firm.
Contrast this with my first experience deploying enterprise storage (circa 1997) as part of the infrastructure roll-out and transformation to a 100% eBusiness corporation. As you may well imagine, the scope of this deployment at this leading semi-conductor firm was colossal (Web front end, ERP, EAI, ETL, B2B, Content management, Data Warehouse, Security, etc). Central to the enterprise blueprint was the company’s data management strategy and the deployment of a scalable and secure storage infrastructure. However, it was not hard to make an architectural and product decision given the mandate to move away from the mainframe (IBM/DB2). We rolled out a fiber channel SAN infrastructure consisting of “7 global SAN Islands” reflecting our workload segmentation characteristics based on RPO/RTO, performance and security objectives
Fast- forward to 2016 - what does it take for a CIO to deliver a next generation infrastructure for a fast growing multi-billion dollar enterprise? The complexity of the task along with the array (no pun intended!) of choices is daunting. Here is a growing list of architectures/product segments all vying for a dis-proportionate share of the the $37 billion (2015 IDC) enterprise storage systems market and the CIO mindshare.
1. Traditional and/or Hybrid storage arrays
2. All Flash Arrays
3. Hyper converged (HCI) and traditional Converged infrastructure
4. PCIe/NVMe extreme performance appliances (4-6u and blade form factors)
5. Emerging NVM fabric (RDMA/IWARP) Rack scale solutions
6. SDS (software defined storage)
7. Intelligent IO offload products coupled with # 1 - #6.
8. …
The IT professional in 2016 has to grapple with cost-effective choices that can be presented to the C-Suite as part of a hybrid cloud strategy and not just be “sold” on the merits of the next “killer” product. To address this there will be a need for a workload <=> product /architecture mapping model that best fits the performance, agility and tco needs of the customer. Most large IT shops have their own benchmarking environments to wring this out on a case by case basis and define their course. However this exercise is destined to get much more complex with m-products x n-cloud service providers in the decision matrix. Perhaps there is an easier way!
To mediate this, the eco system needs to offer a much simpler and unified menu for IT so we do not re-create the very complexity that we are trying to get out of in the migration journey to a cross-cloud landscape as next generation IT.
