Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2016. Read them in this 8th Annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Don Boxley Jr, co-founder and CEO, DH2i
2016 Is the Year Bimodal IT Gets the Boost It Needs with Containers
The term "bimodal IT" got a lot of attention in 2015. It's a
term that describes the practice of managing two modes of IT: traditional Mode
1 teams that are working to improve quality and reliability for current
application and infrastructure loads, and exploratory Mode 2 teams that are
working to address fast-changing new economy opportunities. And while 2015 was
the year of talking about bimodal IT, I predict that 2016 will be the year that
we move to the next logical state of virtualization to master it. How? With
containers.
New Windows container technologies achieve a higher-level
abstraction than virtualization by encapsulating applications and their
associated resources from the OS and infrastructure. You can think of it as application
virtualization.
This is different from a VM, which encapsulates not only the
application, but also the required binaries and libraries along with an entire
guest OS instance and software-defined infrastructure. It's these latter
requirements that cause VMs to get so big: while the application may be tens of
megabytes, a host OS can take up gigabytes. Eventually that leads to VM sprawl,
exploding licensing costs, and decreased agility-everything that works against
bimodal IT.
But by using containers to encapsulate existing enterprise
applications, Mode 1 teams can stack containerized workloads and reduce OS
instances and servers by an additional 8x to 15x over virtualization alone. The
portability of these containers lets teams move workloads between physical,
virtual, or cloud servers with near-zero downtime, measurably improving overall
IT service continuity.
This is also how containers provide the agility to simplify
IT maintenance and free up resources for new Mode 2 initiatives. And Mode 2
teams will be able to take advantage of containers to deploy new
microservices-based architecture applications faster. That means they can deliver
innovative new web experiences and hold the interest of mobile users who can
choose from an ever-growing number of apps.
Those who use containers to master bimodal IT will gain a significant
competitive advantage. With a single, infrastructure-agnostic container
technology as the basis for the new bimodal IT framework, the two IT teams can
easily work together. And because containers make Mode 1 transactional system
data portable, Mode 2 container workload applications can interact with that
data through a back-office Mode 1 application. That allows innovative new Mode
2 applications to deliver real value. After all, customers don't just want mobile
appls to show them things; they want to use them to submit orders and track
delivery progress.
By this time next year, I predict many more organizations
will be touting exceptional business continuity, cost-efficiencies, and
innovation with bimodal IT using containers.
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About the Author
Don
Boxley Jr is a DH2i co-founder and CEO. Prior to DH2i, Don held senior
marketing roles at Hewlett-Packard where he was instrumental in sales and
marketing strategies that resulted in significant revenue growth in the
scale-out NAS business. Don spent more than 20 years in management positions
for leading technology companies, including Hewlett-Packard, CoCreate Software,
Iomega, TapeWorks Data Storage Systems and Colorado Memory Systems. Don
earned his MBA from the Johnson School of Management, Cornell University.
