Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2013.  Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed article by Momchil Michailov, Co-Founder and CEO, Sanbolic, Inc.

2013 – The Year of Software-Defined Data Management

Data center architecture has been evolving rapidly as enterprise compute resources have moved from physical machines to virtualized on-premise machines to hybrid environments which incorporate cloud-based resources. VMware pioneered server virtualization in the enterprise and now describes a vision of the software-defined data center in which compute, network and storage resources are all abstracted from the physical hardware on which they run. Although VMware's acquisition of Nicira is a step toward this goal, network and storage resources still tend to be tethered to proprietary hardware.

Application data is the reason the data center exists. Acquiring, analyzing, distributing, and protecting application data is the core function of almost every IT organization. As compute resources in private and public cloud data centers become more abstracted and flexible, keeping data in hardware-defined silos becomes a more visible obstacle to efficiently managing distributed workloads. Increasingly this data is distributed across a range of heterogeneous storage hardware platforms and geographic locations. Traditional SAN architectures are being supplemented by DAS-based cloud storage and server-side PCIe flash.  Unfortunately, it can be difficult to manage data across these silos in a cohesive fashion while ensuring consistent delivery of SLAs , uniform data protection  and data accessibility across servers and sites for application scale-out, availability (HA), and disaster recovery (DR).

2013 will mark the year in which the IT world recognizes the need for a software-defined data management platform that abstracts data from the hardware on which it resides,  thereby enabling the creation of a highly scalable logical resource that can be centrally (and automatically) provisioned and managed. Such a platform will also have to offer core storage management features such as QoS, distributed data protection, shared access for availability and scale out, and support for geographically distributed application deployments.

In 2013, the IT world will further recognize that a software-defined data management platform is the only way to truly achieve the vision of a software-defined data center that can flexibly deploy highly available applications on shared hardware resources, migrate them across locations, scale up and down in response to demand, and ensure the consistent delivery of SLAs. And once this vision is achieved, the IT world will settle for nothing less than a software-defined data center that allows them to efficiently consolidate, protect and manage their physical, virtual and cloud-based workloads in order to enjoy a more agile and scalable shared cluster of business-critical applications across their public and private clouds.

###

About the Author