Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2016. Read them in this 8th Annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Mark Harris, VP, Corporate Marketing, Pluribus Networks
2016 will be the Year of Re-Thinking IT
According to the US Department of Labor and Statistics, the average age of the professional IT worker is 46 years old. This means that the vast majority of today’s IT professionals learned their technology skills in the early 1990s and likely consider a successful deployment of Netware as their first major accomplishment in their career. While all of the core technologies found in the data center have progressed headily over those past 20 years, most of the change being requested by these same IT professionals have been incremental in nature. They see the IT industry challenges today much as they did back then, and continue to use their tried and true topology designs, just now being deployed with bigger disks, bigger memory, larger network links, etc.
In 2016, the entire nature of computing is being challenged and IT professionals will begin to re-think their very foundation of knowledge. The significance of the data center continues to increase, and the demands placed upon these centers is rising dramatically. Keep in mind that while few Enterprises are building new data centers to occupy, they are ‘renting’ facilities owned and managed by one of a hundred commercial data center operators and these ‘co-location’ sites can still be treated as their data center, since they own and operate everything inside of them.
Regardless of who owns the concrete floors and air-conditioning, the critical nature of computing in the data center is rapidly changing and the deployment of new applications that are elastic, responsive and secured is paramount. In 2016 we will see IT professionals questioning the very nature of their “tried and tested topologies” and in most cases they will create entirely new designs based upon virtualized resources. The software-defined data center is no longer a fantasy, and will no longer be attributed to ‘hype’. The most successful IT professionals in 2016 are re-learning the whole new world of elastic capacity available to their organizations by combining the proven technologies of virtualized computing, virtualized storage and virtualized networks. In 2016, it will be rare to find an IT leader that relies on their existing structures already in place as a starting-point or foundation looking forward. Those same professionals now realize that older infrastructures have become the ‘gating factor’ to supporting new business initiatives and the most attentive IT professionals will become the champion of new elastic technologies like those seen in the world of Software-Defined. In fact, in 2016 ONLY the business requirements itself will be the primary topic of executive discussions, and the detailed implication on changes to the IT structures to support that business will have to be able to fall in line. In 2016, the ‘hype’ nature of Software-Defined will have all but vanished as more and more enterprises begin to publicly claim their competitive differentiation through their adoption of leadership and modern IT foundations.
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About the Author
Mark Harris, VP, Corporate Marketing, Pluribus Networks
Mark Harris brings over 25 years of experience driving data center innovation across a variety of areas including networking, storage, compute and security. Prior to Pluribus, Mark served in a number of increasingly senior roles at DEC, HP, Extreme, Enterasys/Cabletron, Citrix/Netscaler, Avocent/Cyclades, Server Technologies and most recently as Vice President of Marketing and Strategy at Nlyte Software. Harris is a regular contributor to various industry publications, LinkedIn Groups and maintains his own blog, Data Center
