Contributed article by Vanessa Alvarez, Head of Marketing at Scale Computing

2014 – The Year of Reality in Production IT Environments

VDI...not THE YEAR!  But it evolves...

It will never be THE YEAR of VDI, because the use case for it is very vertical specific.  We have seen a great deal of traction in the healthcare and education market, and it makes sense in these verticals.  Also, there are many more cost-efficient alternatives in the market today that achieve the same purpose, at a significantly lower cost.  We may never see mass adoption, but the use cases will warrant solutions that can achieve cost efficiencies and mobility.

FLASH CRASH?

The IPO fever of Fusion-io and Violin Memory quickly died, and said companies are struggling.  Flash will continue to be commoditized to the point where it can be used as a caching tier, and will be much more affordable for any organization to consider.  As flash evolves, field-serviceable PCIe is the direction in which flash will become more usable and cost efficient.

SOFTWARE DEFINED...

Today SDS and SDN are evolving on parallel paths, but these must come together and this will be the next level of hyper convergence, creating more integration points throughout the datacenter.  The more convergence becomes a reality, the more resources become abstracted and simplify the whole infrastructure, eliminating the need for network protocols, storage protocols, etc. 

FILE SYSTEMS DON'T FIT NEW WORKLOAD REQUIREMENTS

File systems were never designed for virtualization.  Storage evolves as workloads become more dynamic, and object based/inspired storage becomes more understood as the storage needed for virtualization and software-defined environments. Object-based storage takes many forms, allowing you to tailor your storage requirements specifically for the applications you're using it for.

HYBRID CLOUD

As public cloud has matured and AWS has come to market with a number of options for private cloud (VPC, gateways etc), hybrid cloud becomes more of a reality.  Organizations feel comfortable having both their own environment for those workloads they feel critical enough to keep on premise, and yet have gone outside for CRM, storage etc.  It's not an either/or situation anymore.

##

About the Author

Vanessa Alvarez is a seasoned technology executive, with expertise in enterprise infrastructure technologies spanning the data center. In her current role as head of marketing at Scale Computing, she oversees the marketing and communications of the company's overall go to market strategy.
Alvarez spent nine years as an analyst covering networking and storage technologies, beginning with The Yankee Group, and, most recently, Forrester Research. Named one of the Top 50 Women in Tech for 2011 and one of the Top Women in Cloud for 2012 and 2013 by CloudNOW, Alvarez has appeared on Bloomberg TV and was recognized for her research in articles and quotes published in CNNMoney, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, GigaOM, Investor's Business Daily, and others.