What do Virtualization and Cloud executives think about 2012? Find out in this VMblog.com series exclusive.

Top Five Datacenter Predictions for 2012

Contributed Article by Mark Davis, CEO, Virsto Software

Datacenter convergence reinvents datacenter roles

Convergence in the datacenter is inevitable as it addresses two of the biggest concerns that senior IT executives and business leaders have today: 1) the cost of computing, and 2) the cost of IT specialists needed to run and manage servers, networks and storage. As companies bring their assets together under a common virtualized framework, traditional roles and responsibilities will morph as departmental silos merge.  With the accelerating trend of more intelligence and management being handled within the hypervisor, the roles of the virtualization administrator and storage administrator will themselves converge, with more of the provisioning, data protection, and performance optimization being done by the virtualization admin. 

Companies (finally) learn how to use SSD

SSDs (solid state drives) have much to offer the enterprise-they are fast, provide tremendous transactional throughput and extremely low latency and are capable of solving some of the most critical, enterprise-level performance concerns. In 2012, the plummeting cost of SSDs, along with the continued adoption of server and storage virtualization, will undoubtedly contribute to a transformation of storage in the enterprise. IT organizations will gain a better understanding of when, where and how best to deploy SSDs as these increasingly become an important part of the storage architecture. A new
generation of startups and existing storage players will continue to develop solutions based on this technology.  In 2012-with costs still relatively high-using SSD efficiently is the name of the game. 

New storage architectures designed for cloud-scale computing and commodity economics will emerge

Virtualization is a key enabler for cloud computing environments; however no company has yet resolved its associated storage issues. Current storage architectures will not scale to provide the elasticity and performance at an acceptable price for private and public clouds to really take off. While cloud
computing promises to optimize resources and deliver on-demand utilization, flexibility and scalability, the underlying cost and rigid architecture of SAN-based storage is a major impediment to widespread cloud computing adoption. There is a clear market opportunity and several promising start ups that are bringing a new approach to storage designed to enable cloud-scale deployments, while delivering dramatically reduced economics of storage in virtualized environments.

The hypervisor will extend to effectively manage enterprise storage hardware  

2012 will see a shift of intelligence from the array to the hypervisor. The leading hypervisor vendors continue to deliver innovation and features on product roadmaps that help solve persistent challenges of virtualized workloads and storage performance and utilization. Storage specialist entrants to the market will extend these platforms to transform hypervisors into "storage hypervisors" with enhanced utilization, performance and management benefits. Over the next year, IT organizations will look to simultaneously optimize the use of hardware and software with an emphasis on the needs of VMs. 2012 will mark a significant milestone as traditionally proprietary software embedded in storage arrays migrates to reside within the hypervisor layer. This will accelerate the pressure on hardware companies to differentiate and strengthen their offerings in a rapidly commoditizing market. 

Multi-hypervisor becomes the industry standard

Over the next year the common industry practice of standardizing on one hypervisor platform in an IT organization will give way to widespread adoption of a multi-hypervisor strategy.  As a result of pricing pressures, platform maturity, and a desire to avoid vendor lock-in, IT organizations will aggressively pursue a multi-hypervisor strategy. The additional complexity this presents will drive adoption of solutions that help IT orchestrate and manage efficiently, and derive value regardless of the hypervisor they are running.  

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About the Author

Mark has been at the center of the networked storage and virtualization revolutions since their inception. He launched the first Fibre Channel disk array in 1994, and was instrumental in growing Sun Microsystems from a non-player to the largest Unix storage vendor within five years. After a stint as VP of marketing at $2B storage vendor StorageTek, Mark repositioned ConvergeNet as the inventor of SAN-based storage virtualization, resulting in a $340M acquisition by Dell. After an instrumental role in the IPO of Evolve Software, Mark returned to the storage industry, working on multiple virtualization projects. Before co-founding Virsto, he was CEO of storage resource management vendor Creekpath Systems, where he engineered its acquisition by Opsware (now HP).