Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2014. Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed article by Neil Levine, Vice President, Product Management, Inktank
Open Source will Dominate the Infrastructure Stack in the Corporate Data Center
The coming year will see an increasing demand from customers
who want to run their data centers along "webscale IT" practices, but the
challenge will be how to provide environments that work simultaneously for
legacy applications and new cloud-native ones simultaneously. Whatever
technologies are chosen, open source will dominate more and more of the infrastructure stack in the corporate data center.
On the compute side, OpenStack will continue to be the
poster child for the new world, and will continue to get traction in the
enterprise. 2014 will see many more deployments made public but there will be
no single dominant use-case that emerges, instead a thousand flowers will bloom
as businesses deploy new applications but also have to discover from first
principles what existing workloads can be migrated. PaaS, in the form of
CloudFoundry and Openshift, will finally become mainstream and be one of the
more common applications running on widely available IaaS platforms. VMware
will continue to take a hedged position against Openstack, safe in the knowledge
that legacy applications will take time to move to the cloud.
On the network side, it will be a slow year for
software-defined networking deployments as the complexity and immaturity of the
technology continues to retard adoption. Most activity will be among vendors as
they collaborate around projects like the Linux Foundation's Open Daylight
project and few commercial products will see mainstream adoption until 2015.
2014 will be a break out year for open source storage. Projects
such as Ceph, Swift, and Gluster will see increasing growth in their
communities and will move beyond parity with legacy storage technologies to
deliver new innovations. The combination of mature products (based on open
source projects), numerous, large scale deployments and the ability to run both
legacy and new workloads on scale-out storage will convince the market that
open source is the best strategy to manage data growth and costs.
ONTAP, OneFS and other proprietary storage operating systems
will no longer be a barrier to entry to the storage market and, just as Android
allowed ODMs and new OEMs to enter the phone handset market, open source
storage will allow new hardware vendors to emerge to take on EMC and NetApp.
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About the Author
Neil Levine is the vice president of product management at Inktank. With a background in large systems
infrastructure and open-source software, Neil is responsible for Inktank's
product strategy. Neil was co-founder and VP Product at venture-backed start-up
Nodeable, and before that was GM/VP at Canonical, the commercial sponsors of
the Ubuntu operating system, where he ran the unit which built tools and
delivered services to Ubuntu's enterprise customers, as well as being
responsible for server and cloud product strategy. As CTO of Claranet, one of
the largest independent internet service and hosting providers in Europe, Neil
helped build the company from 15- employee organization to a 650-strong company
operating in nine countries.