Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2014. Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed article by Jerry Baldwin, Chief Executive Officer, Condusiv Technologies
The Virtual Soothsayer
Every year around this time, since the beginning of time,
predictions for the year to come have been something that people come to expect.
So lets have at it.
2013 is the fifth year since our economy experienced economic
crisis on par with the Great Depression of 1929. The good news, however, is that unlike the
Great Depression that lasted from 1929-1941, we are on the brink of healthier
recovery after only five challenging years, according to the Federal Reserve
meeting on December 18. More on
recovery later.
I think it is very safe to say that today's Information Technology
innovation that was obviously not present in 1929 has placed our industry at
the forefront of enabling recovery today as it did in the 1990's and early
2000's. Innovation and the disruptive
technologies that deliver its positive change have allowed corporate America to
do much more with much less work force and capital.
Moving forward, however, we cannot deny that disruptive
technology has also brought levels of disruption with it. In 2014, it is our responsibility to make
certain that disruption does not become a business IT trend with additional
capital investment burden. We have seen warning signs of this in virtual
environments and enterprise storage in multiple business verticals in 2013,
with healthcare perhaps being the most pronounced. Recovery momentum could be
at risk if a trend prevails.
One of the first benefits from server virtualization was
organizations making efficiency savings from consolidation of under-utilized
equipment, however in 2013, as the use of virtualization has expanded its
footprint many organizations have begun to witness a decrease in cost-efficiency
as they are trading far more costs to the storage backend to support their
newfound agility. Trends such as virtual machine (VM) sprawl have created new
and unique conditions where single volumes now support multiple workloads,
workloads are spread across fewer ports, I/O streams are mixed in the
hypervisor which randomizes the I/O pattern, and more common data is in motion
due to multiple OS's and access points to same bytes of data. All of these
unpredicted conditions have resulted in significant performance problems,
particularly in the I/O sub-system of storage components.
Unfortunately, while hardware price performance costs
continue to come down, performance improvements are not keeping up with the
rate of data growth and need to extract value from that data. In 2013 this performance conundrum has forced
enterprises to purchase increasing amounts of hardware to handle the increased
I/O through sheer brute force. If
organizations continue to buy more storage in 2014 to spread I/O across a
broader number of interfaces or mediums, we predict that business will not
fully capitalize on the promise of virtualization and other technology
trends. If CIO's must spend 80% of their
budget on maintaining their infrastructure as they did in 2013, we predict that
in 2014 they will have even less money to invest in technology innovation, and
or their bottom line will suffer. This
scenario too could well be a threat to economic recovery.
In 2014 our customers must
modernize their IT infrastructure in the face of competition while responding
to the demands of IOP intensive applications, and services driven by the need
for more data by initiatives and data demand.
In 2014 big data will get bigger, we will see as many mobile devices as
world population, healthcare reform solutions, and cloud computing adoption
will be more than trendy.
Soothsayer says
The complexity of virtual environments creates its own
challenges with optimizing performance. While the first wave of virtualization
generated significant savings from increasing CPU utilization from less than
10% to more than 70%, the performance bottleneck has moved to the I/O subsystem
and the storage aspect in particular. In
2014 we will see a new trend as simple, non-intrusive I/O optimization software
solutions are adopted, delivering significant measurable effectiveness for VM's.
The benefit to our customers is simple, these solution will increase
performance while reducing the need to spend on buying new infrastructure to
maintain service levels as workloads increase.
Maintaining, extending
and protecting capital
equipment investments for a portion of the cost of hardware will help retain
recovery momentum in enterprise business, add value to global business and
enable the deployment of more innovation.
##
About the Author
Jerry Baldwin has
spent over 30 years working in the IT industry, and has been instrumental in
many of the evolutionary changes in global and domestic channel sales. Jerry
was an Advisory Board member of CRN and was an early Vendor Council and
Advisory Board member of CompTIA, having worked in Distribution (First
Software), Retail (CompUADD), as well as having been with a major Solution
Provider. Jerry has a unique 360 degree perspective that helped elevate him in
leadership roles with CA and DEC and in becoming the CEO at Condusiv
Technologies. Jerry is recipient of UBMs 30/30 award recognizing his 30 years
as a channel advocate. He was recently named as a Top 50 Midmarket Executive by
Midsize Enterprise Summit, and to the 2013 Top 100 Executives by CRN. Jerry's
vision has led to the reinvention and award winning position of channel
strategy sales for Condusiv Technologies.