Contributed article by Alan Conley, CTO of Zenoss

Why 2014 is the year of the Software Defined Data Center

The New Year brings upon thoughtful considerations about what the tech industry has done and where it is going. As we look back on a year of growth for virtualization, mobility, and the cloud, we also look forward at how this growth will affect modern datacenters.

A New Year primed for the software defined data center

Given the growth of these technologies in 2013, we anticipate that 2014 will be the year of the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC). Vital to the evolution of virtualization and cloud infrastructure, the SDDC will impact the industry and we will begin to see early adopters deploying its concepts.

Although the compute domain has been developing these concepts over the last decade, in 2014 they will take off and we will see rapid advances for both networking and storage. Software Defined Networking (SDN) specifically, will see a rise in popularity as early adopter companies realize the ability to deploy vendor solutions. Up until now, this ability was only available to technological giants such as Yahoo and Google - companies with the resources to write solutions for their own networks.

SDN has been defined in many ways over the last few years, and its value has been heavily attributed to off box control planes allowing for low cost switching fabrics. However, the real value stems from the ability to provide a policy-driven abstraction layer over the network. This general concept - of being able to describe the needs of an application/tenant in an abstract form in terms of compute, network and storage - will really catch on in 2014.

Next generation cloud-based provisioning and configuration

Next generation cloud-based provisioning and configuration is upon us. In the year to come early adopters - vendors with the ability to develop application models that can be rapidly deployed by taking advantage of these abstractions - will pave the way for the rapid adoption of SDN. Additionally, those monitoring vendors with the ability to digest an application model deployed onto an SDDC infrastructure will be able to demonstrate how you can combine day one provisioning and configuration with day two operations support, in near real time. A strong understanding of application and infrastructure dependencies, coupled with performance and availability metrics, event and log data will serve as a foundation for the next generation of IT operational analytics.

Converged infrastructure and the Cloud

In 2014 converged Infrastructure will become the de-facto platform for building Private Clouds. This will be especially true for larger organizations adopting rack-based converged infrastructure solutions for their remote and branch offices. Organizations looking to improve resource utilization will look to converged infrastructure to reduce capital expenses, improve agility and efficiency through automation and faster reallocation of resources.

Technology companies, as well as the telecom and education industries are going to turn to converged infrastructure in 2014. It's a payoff that will deliver beyond 2014.

The Internet of Things

Last, but not least, as the world becomes ever more connected, we predict that businesses will continue working to leverage embedded devices to more accurately target consumers in real-time. Smart phones will also make payment collection easier as NFC payments enabled smartphones allow customers to make payments at multiple places such as airlines, healthcare, retail etc. simply by waving their smartphones.

We also predict that Apple will unveil its iPhone 6 to a huge reception, but that's another article.

##

About the Author

Alan Conley joined Zenoss in 2011 as CTO where he is responsible for driving the Zenoss cloud management vision, direction and on-going innovation. He brings over 20 years of hands-on experience running large scale IT operations and building management products that span virtual, physical and cloud-based IT.

Prior to Zenoss, he served as CTO of the Network Management Group and as a Distinguished Engineer at Cisco Systems, where he was a key driver of Cisco's strategy and architecture for Cloud management, next generation network API, OpenStack, DMTF OVF 2.0, and Open Network Foundation (ONF). He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Davis.